the silence in between
by irishais
Summary: Their love story is written in bullets and lies. They don't know if they would trade it for anything else. Seifer/Quistis, post-game. (Hallowed Ground series.)
1. one

_**the silence in between**_

_-irishais-_

_one. _

This is the third time he's seen her here in the past two weeks, and frankly, it's starting to piss him off a little bit. Aren't there bars in Balamb? Can't she drink her sorrows somewhere else and leave him alone? Seifer finishes the last of a third beer, and taps the counter. "Two," he tells the bartender.

If she's not going to leave voluntarily, he's going to _make _her leave.

Seifer carries the bottles swinging between three fingers and plunks one of them down in front of her.

"What the fuck do you want?" he says, and damned if Quistis Trepe, savior of the goddamned world, doesn't jump about a foot out of her chair. If he had known that was going to be her reaction, he would've come over earlier.

"I beg your pardon," she says stiffly, smoothing her fancy blue top into some semblance of order. She eyes the beer, as if she's not entirely sure how it got there. "I wasn't aware it was a crime to be in a bar now."

"Yeah, well, you're in _my _bar, in _my _town, and you've been staring at me for twenty minutes. Is Balamb too small for you all of a sudden?"

She bites her lip and he wonders if she's going to cry. He fucking _hates _it when girls cry in front of him, but this is Ice-Queen Trepe. She doesn't cry for anyone, not unless it's Leonhart, and now that his old nemesis has a ring on _his _finger and a sorceress trophy wife on his arm, that river's got to be all dried up.

"It's none of your business," she tells him, and picks up the beer, taking a long pull that would make any of the drunks in here proud.

He swivels around the chair on the other side of the table and sits in it, crossing his arms over the tall back. "Actually, I read the papers, Trepe. It's pretty much _everyone's _business at this point." He drinks, and studies her reaction.

Shit, she _is _going to cry.

"Look. You're not the first SeeD to screw up, no matter how fucking famous you are."

"I'm not a SeeD anymore," she says abruptly, and her gaze is blue steel. "That's how badly I _screwed up_, Seifer. They threw me out. And now I'm here, because I don't have anywhere else to go. I'm sure you know what that's like." She picks at the peeling edge of the label on the beer, and the paper comes off in a long diagonal strip in her hand. She flicks it onto the table.

There is a long period of silence in which he's not entirely sure what to say, and for Seifer Almasy, that's a fucking first. He drinks instead, until he thinks of something. "World's a small damn place."

It's not the most original thing, but Trepe lets out a huff and nods.

"I'm beginning to see that."

He sets his empty bottle on the table. "You want another one?"

She shrugs, and he stands up. He doesn't know why he does it. Trepe being upset is like kicking a puppy. It feels _wrong_, somehow.

He brings back two beers and two shots, and she raises an eyebrow at the latter.

"It's a Trabian Car Bomb. Drink it. You'll thank me."

She lifts the shot glass delicately. "Or end up in the emergency room."

He snorts, and taps the glass on the table, then tosses back the contents. It burns like fucking _hellfire_ going down his throat, and he chases it with a mouthful of beer. God_damn_, he'd forgotten how badly those burned.

Quistis watches his reaction warily. He gestures at her.

"Your turn. Cheers, Trepe."

She drinks the shot and her face flushes; she swallows hard and coughs. Seifer shoves the second beer in her hand and she grabs at it, taking several deep swallows.

"You _bastard_!" she exclaims, when she can speak again.

He laughs, loud and long and hard, so much that the few patrons in the bar turn their heads and stare. He laughs until it hurts in his chest and wipes at his eyes, he laughs until he thinks Trepe might dig out her phone and call an ambulance. "I think that's the first time I've ever heard you swear, _Instructor_," he says, and the mockery comes out gentler, friendlier. Almost an endearment, or as close as he'll get to one.

"Shut up, Almasy," she says, and gets up, grabbing her purse.

"You don't have to leave," he tells her.

"I wasn't going to."

She leaves him alone for long enough he wonders if she lied to him, and when she returns, she's carefully holding two glasses that glow almost white. It's like the drink's made of lightning.

"A Quetzalcoatl," she informs him. "They almost didn't have the last ingredient, which is why they took so long to make."

He studies the glass. "What's that?"

"It's a secret." She sits primly across from him, raising her glass. "Cheers," Quistis says, in a mockery of him, and drinks. She gives every impression of enjoying it. What the hell. It can't be that bad, if Trepe likes it.

He takes the shot.

_xx_

Maybe it's the years that have passed between them, but Seifer seems softer than she remembers. His sarcasm is all bark, his insults have no bite. He's almost a reasonable human being, if he weren't a war criminal. That's a stigma that's very hard to see past, even when he's choking on a shot that's got a diluted cure spell as one of its core ingredients. Quistis studies him, the way his suit jacket hangs just a little too loosely on his shoulders, the way his tie is loosened around his neck. The way his laugh echoes around the bar, like he hasn't laughed in a long, long time.

It is hard to superimpose this man over a permanent memory of an eighteen-year-old boy who tried to kill her because his "mother" said so.

He shrugs out of his jacket at one point, and shoves the sleeves of his white dress shirt up around his elbows. The muscles in his forearms are still taut. She wonders if he still keeps up with Garden's exercise regimen, even now. It's a hard habit to break, she's beginning to learn.

Maybe that's why she keeps coming back here. Kindred spirits, and all that. She's got a mark just as black on her record now, and three dead cadets on her conscience. They drink and talk about nothing, and drink some more, and she relaxes, inch by inch, until Seifer glances at his watch and sighs.

"C'mon, Trepe, I'll walk you home." He slings his jacket over his shoulder.

"I can get home on my own."

The bar spins a half rotation when she stands, and Seifer grabs her arm to steady her. She's almost glad Xu dragged her out to Wendigo's so many times. Rightfully, she probably shouldn't be standing.

"You're drunk as hell, and Dollet's a shithole. I'm an asshole, but I'm not _that _big of one."

"I can get a cab."

He snorts. "Not likely. Cabs stop at midnight in this town."

She checks her own watch- it's almost 0200. No wonder he's ready to get out of here. She should've left hours ago- not that she has anywhere to go in the morning. Quistis gathers up her purse and slips it over her shoulder. She blames it on all the alcohol when she nods and trails him out of the bar. The night air is cool and clear, and there's a pleasant breeze coming off of the ocean. She's glad Dollet is a beach town- she doesn't know if she could go without the sight of the sea, even if it reminds her of Balamb. She'll take the resort traffic and the general disinterest of the locals if it means she doesn't have to be trapped in a tiny fishing town where every single person knows her name.

She shivers in a gust of night air, and Seifer drops his jacket around her shoulders without a word. He must be drunk. It's the only way she could ever imagine him being any sort of gentleman.

When Quistis looks at him, he is looking straight ahead, his hands in his pockets, his profile as strong as she remembers it.

"Thanks. For the drinks."

He nods.

"It was good to see you, Seifer, really. I mean it."

There's a glimmer of a smirk at the corner of his mouth. "You really are a bleeding heart, Trepe." The words have no sting.

They turn at the next street, and stop in front of a white-washed townhouse with a blue door. It's as quaint as can be for Dollet, almost predictable in its paint scheme. Inside are half-unpacked boxes and décor out of a catalogue, but he doesn't have to know that. Quistis reaches into her bag for her key.

She hands him back his jacket without meeting his eyes, and his fingers brush hers as he takes it.

"Well," he says. "See you around, Trepe."

She nods. "You too. Thanks again."

He shrugs and lifts two fingers in a mock salute. "My pleasure. Night, Instructor."

_Don't call me that. _

She smiles a little and turns to unlock her front door. When she looks back again, he is already at the corner, and in a second, he is gone.

Quistis closes her door and twists the lock.

An hour later, after three glasses of water and a shower that leaves her feeling slightly less like she's rolled around in a wet ashtray, Quistis draws back the sheets on her bed and sits, picking up her cell phone from the nightstand. The display reads 0315, but she knows Xu will be awake. Xu doesn't sleep very much anymore, not since Squall abandoned Garden into her care and took off to be with Rinoa in some tiny town no one can place on a map.

Sure enough, Xu answers on the second ring. "Speak."

"I'm in, I think."

"Good. Keep me updated." Xu hangs up without waiting for a response, and Quistis draws the phone from her ear. The display blinks _call disconnected _at her, and then the message disappears. She sets the phone aside, then slips under the covers, pulling the blanket up to her chin.

Sleep is a long time claiming her, and when her alarm goes off at 0800, Quistis isn't sure that she has slept at all.


	2. two

_two. _

Seifer runs into her two days later, when he's walking out of Dollet's one acceptable coffee shop at the tail end of his so-called lunch break.

Literally, runs into her, where she walks right into him and his coffee goes sailing into the air in a neat arc, only to erupt into a truly spectacular fountain of caffeine once the cup hits the ground.

"_Dammit_," he swears, yanking out one of his headphones. "Watch where you're fucking _going, _you little piece-"

Quistis pushes her glasses back up on her nose and shakes her head. Seifer swallows the last half of the insult.

"Sorry. I was- distracted."

_Thinking about dead kids, no doubt. _

He shrugs. "Whatever. It's fine."

Seifer lifts the ear bud to put it back in, and Quistis puts her hand on his arm. He stops, and looks down at her.

"Please," she says. "Let me buy you a new drink. It's my fault."

He glances at his watch- time's ticking by too fast, and if he doesn't go _now_, he's not going to get back to work on time.

"Can't. No time. Here." He reaches into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulls out a pen that's definitely seen better days. When he reaches into his pockets for a scrap of paper, he comes up empty, and is suddenly irritated he tossed his receipt as soon as he got it. Seifer thinks for a second, and then he grabs Trepe's hand, scrawling his cell number across her palm.

She stares, shocked at the boldness of the gesture, or maybe he drew blood with the pen or something.

"Rain check, Trepe."

He leaves her standing there, ink drying on her palm.

_xx_

It takes her almost ten minutes to scrub the phone number off of her hand, and Quistis attacks the mostly faded digits with another layer of soap and hot water.

That was easier than she had expected.

She isn't aware that she has stopped washing until her fingers start searing with the heat of the water. Quistis jerks her hands back, and shuts off the faucet, drying herself on a soft white towel. The phone number is all but gone when she checks her palm, but the skin is tender red. It's no worse than the residual burns from a fire spell, she decides. No sense worrying about it.

Quistis leaves the bathroom, flicking off the light switch as she goes, and makes her way into the living room, where her laptop sits on the arm of the sofa. She boots it up. Xu will want a report, no matter how trivial it seems- and right now, this _mission_ is turning into a scene from one of those terrible romantic comedies that Rinoa used to drag her to endless rounds of.

The memory is a cruel reminder of the fact that Rinoa is off somewhere in the middle of nowhere, just like the rest of her friends are scattered to the four corners of the world. She must be the _only _one trying to claw her way back into Garden, even after they escorted her into the headmaster's office (they did not put her in handcuffs, but they may as well have), sat her down, and Xu told her that she was being decommissioned from active duty immediately, pending a full investigation of the events in Centra.

She doesn't even know if this mission is officially on the books, or if it's just Xu's idea of giving her something to do so she doesn't feel completely useless. It's bad enough that she hasn't gotten a proper night's sleep since the Centran incident; the faces of the three cadets still cycle through her mind every time she closes her eyes, a horrible movie on endless repeat.

_Get close to Seifer Almasy. _

Quistis knows that Xu is still furious about the way the trial ended, where Seifer was given a slap on the wrist and released into the wild. Not even a public menace anymore, just a sad shell of a man who talked about what he could remember in increasingly fragmented recollections, shards of glass where the Balamb Garden team remembered a glittering whole.

They called him puppet, possessed, ten out of ten psychiatrists agreed. The whole thing was Edea's doing, and she couldn't even be held responsible for that, although they tried their best to put _her_ head on the chopping block.

She lets her fingers rest on the keyboard. Ultimecia's face flashes in her mind for just a split second, red and hard consonants and horns and wings.

It's impossible to prosecute a monster, a demon.

_Burn the witch_.

She isn't sure why those words are the ones that rise immediately to mind.

Her fingers are moving without her complete command, and when Quistis looks at the laptop screen, the report is already mostly completed. There isn't much to tell. Dollet might be a small town, but Seifer has had eighteen years' worth of training and experience, and if he doesn't want to be found-

She thumbs through her phone until she finds his number, a neat row of digits that she hastily types into the report. She hits send.

She feels immediately guilty. But guilt is not a new feeling for Quistis Trepe, and she will survive.

Quistis closes the lid of her laptop with a soft click.

_xx_

The phone rings, and the display lights up the room, brighter than the sun, it seems. Seifer groans and turns over, clamping the pillow over his head. It rings again. He wonders what the hell possessed him to pick what seems like the single most irritating ringtone in the history of the known _universe. _

He slides one hand out and fumbles around on the nightstand, bumping into lamp, alarm clock, a battered paperback (which hits the floor with a thud) and finally finds the phone. He slides the arrow on the screen to unlock the touch screen. The number is unknown, and the area code is Balamb. He taps the "answer" icon.

"What?" he says groggily.

"Seifer?" The voice at the end is soft, female, and hesitant.

"Who's this?"

"It's Quistis. Is this a bad time? I can-"

He rolls onto his back and rubs sleep grit out of his eyes. "No. It's fine. What's up?"

"Nothing." There is a pause. "Well. Actually-"

"Spit it out, Trepe." He turns his head and glances at the alarm clock. It's almost seven at night. He's slept half the damn evening.

"I was wondering if you wanted to cash in on that rain check. For coffee. I could really, uh... I don't know. Use someone to talk to, I guess."

_Fun, isn't it? Without Garden's army of head shrinkers to help you sleep at night? _

He does not say this out loud.

"Sure." Seifer tosses aside the comforter and sits up.

"Really?" Trepe actually sounds surprised. Man, he's getting tired of people thinking he's not a decent fucking human being every so often.

"Yeah. Really." He grabs a pair of jeans off of the floor that have probably seen better days, and pads across the bare wood floor to his closet, digging out a t-shirt from his limited wardrobe. A few regular shirts, more dress clothes, too many ties. He never really pictured himself as a tie kind of guy. Of course, he never pictured himself a washed out ex-con with a shit nine-to-five job anyway. But there it is.

"Um. Okay. Great. I'll meet you at the Roast? Their website says they're open until ten."

"Damn, Trepe. You must really want to talk if you think it's going to take three hours to drink a cup of coffee." It takes a careful balancing act to get the shirt on over his head without dropping the phone. He tugs the hem down and picks up his wallet and keys, shoving them in his pocket. "I'll meet you there in ten minutes."

"Okay. See you." She disconnects first.

Seifer saves her number as "Instructor," just because he's pretty sure it would piss her off if she ever found out, and shoves his feet into a pair of ratty flip flops sitting near his front door. He jogs down the hall of the apartment building, and takes the stairs two at a time.

The night is balmy for a Dollet summer, and luck is with him. He catches a cab that is cruising by. It drops him off three minutes ahead of schedule. He passes a twenty-gil note to the driver, gets his change back in a handful of one-gil coins, and parks himself in front of the building, leaning against the brick as he waits.

_xx_

She's probably kept him waiting forever, Quistis realizes, as Seifer pushes himself off of the wall at her approach.

"I couldn't get a cab."

"I told you, Trepe. That's a rare thing in this town."

He pulls open the door for her and Quistis ducks under his arm. The Roast is, contrary to its name, cool inside. There is no line at the counter. She orders a latte with half the espresso, and Seifer gets an enormous cup of coffee that could probably fuel half the Galbadian army.

She eyes him as he takes the cup. "You're going to be awake for the next week."

"I'll survive," he tells her, rolling his eyes. "Pay the nice lady, Trepe."

She hands over her credit card, gets it back, and trails Seifer to a corner booth with a view of the boardwalk. It is a recent installation; six years ago, it was all dunes and bridges and fountains. She supposes the X-ATMO had something to do with Dollet's redecorating.

She wonders if Seifer ever thinks about his last failed SeeD exam in this very town, and then decides it would be smarter not to ask. He empties exactly half a packet of sugar into his coffee, leaving the paper container in a neat little pile on the table. In the bright lights of the coffee shop, his hands are dotted with tiny scars. Slips from working with Hyperion, no doubt. Her eyes travel up his forearms. There is a big knot of scar tissue in his left elbow.

Seifer catches her looking. "Shrapnel from the Garden battle," he says without waiting for her to ask. He doesn't offer further elaboration. She doesn't press for it.

Her latte is the perfect temperature to drink, so Quistis busies herself with that task, trying to ignore Seifer's eyes on her.

"What?" she finally asks.

He shrugs. "You wanted to talk. I'm waiting for you to start talking."

She sets the paper cup down on the table. "Oh. Right. Sorry."

"Stop apologizing, Trepe, it doesn't suit you." Seifer takes a long sip of his coffee.

She runs her thumb down the seam of the cup. "You didn't _have _to meet me here. It's not like I held a gun to your head or anything."

He snorts. "I'm just saying what you need to hear. You're beating yourself up over this. It's in the past. It's over."

"Some of us can't get over trauma as easily as you can, it seems."

He hunches forward and points at her. "You don't get to give me that special fucking snowflake excuse, Trepe. You got some cadets killed. That's _Garden_, that _happens. _You mourn them. You get over it. Sure, they threw you out on your ass, but at least you stand half a fucking chance of rebuilding your life." Seifer sits back and glares at her. "You're not stuck in this shithole forever."

She doesn't know what to say.

"Look, if you're going to give me some sob story, at least tell me something real. Otherwise, I'm out of here." He slides toward the end of the booth.

Quistis lunges out, grabbing his arm. "Don't go," she says. The words come out in a burst of desperation. "I-"

He waits, and raises an eyebrow at her.

"I was the squad leader. I'd gotten some intel that there was militia activity in the area, but I thought it wouldn't be that bad. I thought we could handle it. It was a _field exam, _it was supposed to be... easy."

She sees the chain of events in her mind's eye as precisely as if it were yesterday and not two months past.

"I sent in half the team to retrieve the data we needed. I put the other half of the team on watch. I stayed back, monitoring from a remote location. I _told _them to double check for snipers, for anything that seemed unusual; I'd gone over the area myself. _I _thought it was clear, but I _told them_-"

She sees the wink of light from a ridge high above them, and watches as Serah Field's head explodes. She sees Marcus Johne running for cover, dragging Dena Rice behind him. She sees them reach the building's relative safety.

The searing light of the explosion will stay with her forever, the screams of her watch team the lullaby that sends her into restless slumber every night.

Somehow, she has gotten hold of Seifer's hand, and has his fingers in a white-knuckled grip.

"I disregarded that report. I put that team into deliberate danger, and I did not go with them. I should've-"

"Trepe. _Trepe_. Let go, I think you're breaking my goddamned fingers."

His voice drags her back, and the Roast's bright lights come into focus again. Seifer is easing his hand out of her grip, his eyes locked on hers. She lets go, abruptly.

"I'm... sorry," she says. "I'm sorry."

"You want to get out of here?" he asks gruffly.

She follows him outside into the night air, into the sounds of traffic and seagulls and waves crashing on the shore. The warm air is a balm on her skin. She exhales.

Seifer waits for her to say something. She doesn't know what to say.

The salty sea seems like a good enough destination, and she starts walking. He is behind her, a half-step off of her pace.

"Trepe- _Quistis_, wait."

She walks onto the boardwalk, pushing her way through the dinner time crowd and going down the short flight of stairs leading to the sand. It wells up around her toes, and she kicks off her sandals.

Seifer's hand is on her shoulder, and she stops.

"I'm sorry," he says, and it sounds so strange coming from him that she turns around and buries her face in his chest, holding tight to his shirt. The sobs well up out of her throat, choking her with the enormity of them.

_xx_

He doesn't know what to do when Trepe starts crying into his shirt like it's a tissue.

Gingerly, he puts his arms around her, and sort of pats at her back in vague circles.

"C'mon, Trepe," he says. "Calm down."

He's never been very good with crying women.

Eventually, she pulls back, and scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her hands. "God, I'm-" She doesn't finish the sentence; instead, she wipes at the front of his shirt. "I didn't mean to ruin your clothes."

"Laundry detergent's a pretty revolutionary invention," he says with a shrug, scratching at the back of his neck. "You going to live?"

She laughs, and the sound comes out half-choked. "I guess."

"Okay. Good. Okay," he repeats, and he's not sure why he does it, but he puts his arm around her shoulders. She doesn't pull away. "Let's find you a cab."

"I'd rather walk."

"Okay."

They trudge back to the stairs. He lets his arm fall away when Quistis bends down to retrieve her sandals. She starts up the stairs.

"You don't have to walk me home," she says. "I'm alright, really."

He shrugs. "I live about five blocks past you. I'm going that direction anyway."

"Oh." And he swears he sees her smile, like she's happy he's that close.

Maybe he's just imagining things.

_xx_

He drops her off at her door.

"Well. You're here."

"That I am." She shifts from one foot to the other. "I really didn't mean to have a... nervous breakdown, Seifer."

Seifer smiles, and she is surprised by how good it looks on him. "It's alright. I think you've earned at least one."

She chuckles. "You're probably right."

"We'll have to do this again, without the whole crazy bit."

"I'd like that."

"You sure you're okay?"

Quistis nods. "I'll live."

He stands there, studying her for a moment like he's not entirely sure she's right.

She reaches out and squeezes his hand. "I promise. I'm fine." Quistis climbs the two steps to her door and puts the key in the lock.

"Trepe."

She turns around, and (so quickly that later, she thinks she might have hallucinated it), Seifer leans in and kisses the corner of her mouth. His lips are warm against her skin; the warmth is gone as quickly as it arrives. She stares at him.

"Good night," he tells her, his tone oddly formal. He turns and walks away, hands in his pockets, before she has a chance to respond.

She steps inside. The door is hard at her spine, and she isn't entirely sure how long she stands there, trying to process what just happened.


	3. three

_three. _

He sits in a hotel room in Deling City, and methodically cleans a gun. The room stinks of the weapons oil. He has ruined at least two washcloths, and is considering destroying a third. It doesn't matter.

Seifer cleans, and cleans, and cleans, until his hands are covered in grease and the gun is as pristine as when it came off of the assembly line.

He reassembles it, clicking pieces together. When timed, he can do this in fifteen seconds. Tonight, he takes his time, ensuring everything fits precisely together. It's a flagrant violation of his release from Garden's tribunal to even _have _it, but legality isn't going to help him pay the bills, pay the rent, put food on the table.

Seifer clicks the last piece into place, and sets the gun in its metal case, then spins the lock at random to seal it. He washes his hands for five minutes, scrubbing out every last trace of oil and grease and blood from underneath his fingernails. One of his cuticles starts to bleed. He presses a piece of toilet paper against the wound until it stops, then flushes the bloody tissue down the toilet.

The clock on the wall tells him that he's got an hour left before visiting hours at Galbadia General are over. Seifer shrugs on his overcoat, pockets his room key next to his wallet, and makes sure the gun case is buried in his duffel bag beneath a layer of clothes. He slips a thick envelope into the inside pocket of his coat. The bills are all crisp, new, pulled from an ATM just down the street.

He grabs a bus going uptown, and it drops him off a block away from the hospital. The night is cool, much cooler than the temperatures he left in Dollet. Seifer walks up the gentle hill to the hospital entrance, and signs his name in an illegible scribble at the visitors' center. They give him a sticker to put on his coat. He does, and tosses the paper backing into a trash can on his way to the elevator banks.

On the eleventh floor of Galbadia General Hospital, it is cool, sterile, and bright white, all slick surfaces that are easy to clean. Seifer makes a series of turns that are becoming too familiar, and knocks softly on a partially ajar door.

Raijin looks up and nods at him. Fujin smiles; he cannot stand how her face lights up that much. She shouldn't be so happy to see him, not when she's got much more important things to worry about.

"Hey," he says. There is a chair near the bed, and Seifer sits in it, shrugging out of his coat and letting it fall over the back of the chair. "How're you doing?"

"The same," Raijin offers. "That's good, yeah?"

"Out of here in a week," Fujin proclaims, and her voice is terribly, terribly weak. She looks like hell.

He forces himself to laugh a little. "Three days, tops, Fuj." Her face is gaunt; her hair is fanned around her head in a preemptive halo. Seifer tries to ignore the complex series of tubes running into his best friend's arms. He focuses instead on her little gold wedding ring, the only spot of color in the bleak bed.

This isn't how this is supposed to go.

His phone buzzes against his thigh, and Seifer slips it out of his pocket, grateful for the momentary distraction.

It is a text from Trepe. _Drinks? _

Seifer instinctively hits the reply icon, and his thumb pauses over the keyboard. _Can't_, he finally types out, and hits send. The phone gets put away, back into his pocket. It buzzes again a few seconds later, and Seifer ignores it.

"Important?" Fujin asks, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Nah."

Later, when Fujin succumbs to the deep sleep of disease, he stands out in the hall with Raijin, and pulls the envelope out. "Here," he says, holding it out in front of him. "It's not a whole hell of a lot, but-"

Cancer is a fucking expensive disease.

"Thanks, man," Raijin says, and Seifer doesn't know how his friend is even holding himself together. He would've broken something by now.

"What does her doc say?"

Rai shrugs. "Two months? Three? It's hard, ya know. The chemo's not doing a whole lot- they don't know if it's going to take this time. Last time, she was lucky."

"She's always been lucky," Seifer says. It's the truth. Fujin's always managed to squeak by trouble. This time, though...

He doesn't want to finish that thought. He doesn't know if he can handle it.

"I have to go back to Dollet," Seifer adds after a moment. "I couldn't get any more time off."

Raijin nods. "I'm glad you came, man. She needed to see you. We both miss you."

He inclines his head once, tightly. "Yeah. See you. Tell her I said goodbye."

Raijin yanks him in for one brief, brotherly squeeze, and goes back inside the room.

Seifer turns on his heel, leaving the beeping monitors and the crisp bright halls. When he gets outside, the air hits him like a punch to the gut. He stops at the hotel long enough to grab his bag and check out, and gets to the train station just as his is pulling in.

He puts his head back and closes his eyes once he's settled into an empty cabin. It isn't any use. He doesn't sleep.

He disembarks in Balamb, long enough to catch the early ferry to Dollet.

_xx_

The storm rages outside, and Quistis wonders if this will be the flood that finally sinks Dollet into the sea.

She's been sitting in this chair for a long time. Hours. She isn't sure.

Quistis unfolds her legs and massages her aching calves. Her feet are pins and needles. Thunder explodes outside.

She wonders where Seifer is. His curt text is all she's heard from him in nearly a week.

Her phone rings, startling her out of her reverie. She gets up out of the nest she has made on the sofa, and crosses to her tiny kitchen table. Seifer's name appears on the display, and the clock in the upper corner reads just past five in the morning.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's uh- it's me."

"Seifer?" She can barely hear him over the howl of the wind in the background. "Where are you?"

"I'm at the ferry station. Can you- do you have a car?" His voice is strange, off-key to her, like he's not entirely sure of himself.

"Yes..."

"Could you give me a ride? I'd walk, but I think I might drown."

A yawn catches her completely off guard, and Quistis does it right into the phone before she can stop herself.

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry. Shit, I woke you up, didn't I?"

She doesn't have the energy to tell him that she hasn't been to bed yet.

"I'll come get you," Quistis says.

She ends the call, and gathers her raincoat from its hook by the door. It valiantly tries, and fails, to live up to its name; she is soaked nearly through by the time she finishes her mad dash to the parking garage at the end of the street. Her car is a vintage two-door coupe, bought on a splurge with her first paycheck as an Instructor. She runs her fingers along the glossy dark green paint, and mourns the upholstery as she climbs in. The engine turns over on the first try.

She drives slowly, her windshield wipers working overtime to beat the rain out of her view, and it takes a good ten minutes for the car's heater to warm up to acceptable levels. Eventually, she navigates Dollet's maze of streets, and finds herself at the port. A weather-beaten building that rightfully should have gone into the ocean during the first good storm takes up the northern corner of the lot. She pulls the car as close to the entrance as she can get, and unlocks the passenger door. One beep on the horn, and a tall figure in a dark coat dashes out into the storm, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

Seifer ducks into the car, looking about as pleased as a cat in a bathtub.

"Fuck," he says, by way of greeting. "Has it been like this all week?"

"More or less." She puts the car in reverse, and backs up, throws it in drive and heads back to the main road. "Where were you?"

"Deling," he says, and the answer surprises her. It is the last place she would imagine Seifer Almasy going voluntarily.

"Why?"

Seifer runs his hands through his sopping hair. "Does it matter?"

"I was just wondering." She stops for a red light and looks over at him. He looks like hell, frankly, about as good as she feels right now.

"I was visiting friends. Fujin. Raijin."

He does not apologize for making her worry. She does not expect him to even know that she _was _worried.

"How are they doing?"

"Fine. Rai is fine. Fuj is-" Seifer lapses into silence, and when Quistis glances over at him, he is staring out the window.

"Seifer?"

But she does not get the completion of his thought. "Turn left here," is all Seifer says; for a while after, it is only his occasional direction that breaks the silence. They come to a stop in the lot of an old apartment building. Quistis supposes it could be generously called "historic," but the sleeplessness is getting to her, and all she can think of is how one good gust of wind should bring it crumbling down.

"You want some coffee?" Seifer asks as she idles in front of the entryway, not quite meeting her gaze. "Since I dragged you out of bed and all."

"I wasn't sleeping," she tells him.

"Is that a no, then?"

She pulls into a parking space and turns off the engine.

_xx_

He is aware of how sparse his apartment is as soon as Quistis sets foot beyond the threshold. Seifer drops his bag near the door, and then slings his coat up onto a rack mounted onto the wall by the previous tenants. Quistis shrugs out of her tan raincoat; he hangs that up as well. Both coats drip puddles onto the warped wooden floor. He feels like maybe he should get a towel and stick it under them, just so he seems less like a slob.

Quistis looks around, taking in his secondhand furniture, the battered desk shoved in a corner, the television on its vaguely-correctly-assembled stand near the window. She shivers in the cool air- it had been nearly eighty degrees and sunny when he left. Seifer twists the dial on the thermostat.

"You want to borrow a sweater?" he asks.

"No, I'm fine. Coffee will do just as well."

If there is one thing he has in his tiny kitchen, it's coffee. Setting the pot to percolating is enough to distract him from his thoughts for about ninety seconds.

Deling City is the last thing he wants to think about.

_Home in a week_, Fujin insists.

It's the _last fucking thing_ he wants to think about.

He pours the coffee into two plain blue mugs, and carries them into what passes for his living room. Quistis is sitting on the edge of the couch, like she's afraid it's going to eat her or something.

Seifer hands her one of the mugs. "I think there's milk in the fridge."

"Black is fine. Thanks."

He sits down next to her. Outside, the storm continues its ferocious howling, and he watches the branch of a tree shake violently just outside of his window.

"Nasty outside."

"Mmm."

Eventually, the apartment warms up, and Seifer finishes his coffee. Quistis hasn't said a word for twenty minutes.

Is she pissed at him? He cannot imagine why.

He looks over at her, and finds that she has curled up against the armrest, her coffee mug set aside on the folding table next to the sofa, her head nestled in the crook of her arm. A tendril of hair forms a golden coil down the length of her throat. When did she last sleep?

Her face is relaxed, peaceful, almost. Seifer looks away abruptly, and stands, taking both mugs back into the kitchen. She does not stir when he picks up his duffel bag and walks past the couch to his bedroom. He unpacks without really thinking about it, dumping the clothes into his laundry hamper, and tucking the gun case away into a far, dark corner of his closet, where he has to stand on his toes just to shove it to the back. It bumps against the wall. Good enough.

The shower is blistering hot, beating the hell out of the knots in his back, and Seifer stands under the spray for a long fucking time.

It's not _fair. _

He shuts off the faucet and gets out of the shower, yanking a towel around his waist.

If anyone should be dead, it should be him. Not Fujin. Not when she's got her _whole fucking life_ to live, and he's already screwed his to hell and back anyway.

He throws on a pair of jeans. There's a goddamned hole forming in one of the knees. He bangs his fist on the wall next to his closet. "Fuck!" he snarls. It makes him feel a little better. He does it again. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck!" _His fist leaves a dent in the cheap plaster.

"Seifer?"

_Shit. _

Quistis is standing in the doorway of his bedroom, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. "Are you alright?" she asks.

That is the goddamned question of the century.

"Fine," he tells her. "I'm just fucking peachy."

His hand hurts.

_xx_

She steps across the threshold into his room, and feels like she might've crossed a line. "What happened in Deling?" she asks softly.

"Fujin has cancer." The words come out of his mouth in a bitter monotone, like he's practiced it.

It explains the swearing, the dent in the wall, the way he can't look right at her, can't focus on anything.

"I'm sorry, Seifer," she says.

"I'm not in the mood for pity, Trepe," he says, and sinks down on the end of his bed, putting his face in his hands for a second and saving it from becoming a show of weakness by raking his fingers back through his hair. "Seriously." He exhales. The sound is ragged.

She crosses quickly before she thinks too hard about why she does it, and sits next to him. Their shoulders touch. Seifer doesn't move away, though.

Outside, the storm rages.

Quistis touches his arm, tracing a cord of muscle up his shoulder with her fingertips. He turns his face to look at her, eyes searching hers.

"Quist-"

"Shh," she whispers, and this time, she kisses him, pressing her lips gently to his. He doesn't respond for a second. Perhaps she has misjudged him- but then he is kissing her back, his hand sliding up her neck to tangle his fingers in her hair. Her heart rushes in her chest.

This isn't how this is supposed to go.

Seifer pulls her into his lap. She kisses her way down the curve of his throat, and rests her head in the crook of his shoulder. His fingers tighten in the thin fabric of her shirt, and his chin is solid against the top of her head.

This isn't how it's supposed to go, but she doesn't think she cares anymore.


	4. four

_four. _

Quistis Trepe sits in a boardroom, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, and listens in silence as a panel of Garden council members, most of who have never spoken to her before this meeting, discusses her fate.

There is a hole in her stocking; she resists the urge to pick at it.

"Your recommendation to Commander Xu Chang was that Seifer Almasy should no longer be of concern to the Garden organization?" one of them asks her, an older woman with her hair scraped back from her face into a bun that makes her look far older than she probably is.

"Yes," she says, carefully. "I don't believe he's a threat to Garden or the community at large."

"We have here an analysis of your most recent psychiatric appointment with Dr. Kadowaki. She says you are still having trouble sleeping, because of your trauma in Centra?"

The question is one she was expecting. "I wouldn't say it's affected my ability to make rational decisions."

"But you also indicate that you've, in fact, befriended Mr. Almasy."

"I was under orders by my direct superior to obtain intelligence regarding Mr. Almasy's mental condition after being released into public society, as part of a routine intelligence gathering operation. I was informed that this information should be obtained by whatever means necessary. So, yes. We've become acquainted."

"Commander Chang seems to believe it's more than just mere acquaintanceship."

She remembers the taste of Seifer's kiss, the feeling of his hands on her skin. Quistis keeps her expression neutral. "I don't see what that has to do with my ability to provide the required information in a reasonable timeframe." She meets Traverts' gaze, and the Trabian headmaster looks down at the file in front of her.

"With all due respect, Miss Trepe," and she does not miss the stress on the _miss_, "forgive us if we're not entirely convinced of your judgment right now."

_I haven't slept with him, if that's what you're implying. _

She clears her throat, and uncrosses her legs, leaning forward in her seat. "Seifer Almasy made a mistake. He has spent the past six years trying to rectify that. I've also made a mistake, and feel I should be offered at least the opportunity to-"

"Seifer Almasy has a track record of _mistakes_. This is not about a mistake, Miss Trepe. This is about deliberate, willful ignorance of intelligence that resulted in the deaths of three very promising SeeD cadets. We have had a lot of pressure put on us for your immediate resignation from Garden. It is only because of former Commander Leonhart's recommendation that you are even eligible for the grace period we've given you."

She looks down the panel of board members. "I will respect whatever decision the Garden Council makes," she says finally.

Xu is the one who casts down the sentence.

"In light of recent events," Xu says, and her expression is blank, like she and Quistis were never friends, like they never shared each other's laughs and tears and sparred until they bled and taught the other how to make proper coffee and- "the International Council of Garden Institutions has voted to deny your reinstitution as an Instructor in Balamb Garden, and has also moved that you be removed from Garden rosters as an active A-rank SeeD. You will receive any monetary compensation owed to you from previously completed missions within thirty days of this hearing. You will leave any GF, junctioned spells, and Garden property in care of a Garden representative. You will not be eligible for re-admittance." Xu closes the file in front of her. "I'm sorry, Quistis."

For just a second, Xu sounds like she actually cares.

Quistis nods once.

"You're dismissed," Traverts tells her.

This is it, then. Quistis stands, snaps to attention, and salutes the panel crisply. She can feel their eyes on her back as she leaves.

She rides the ferry back to Dollet with dry eyes. There is nothing she can do. She throws away the torn stockings in the ferry's restroom.

_xx_

Seifer calls her a half hour after she walks in the door and invites her to dinner. She invents a headache. He offers to come by with beer instead. It seems a much more appealing alternative than going out and interacting with people. Quistis tells him to come by at eight; she doesn't bother changing out of the suit she wore to the hearing.

He arrives fifteen minutes late with two six-packs and a pizza. The beer is a no-frills local brew. She can't find her bottle opener, and knocks the lid off with the edge of the kitchen counter instead.

"Impressive," Seifer says, raising an eyebrow. Quistis passes him a bottle, and it turns out he has an opener on his damn key ring, like a civilized adult. Another one of her Garden-bred life skills, put to waste. Quistis carries her beer and the rest of the six-pack into the living room, setting the box on the table and flopping herself down in the middle of the couch. Seifer sits next to her.

"Pass me the remote."

He does. Quistis picks a movie at random from one of the premium channels. The first scene has something exploding. Good. She lifts Seifer's arm and curls up under it, resting her head against his chest. His fingers stroke her shoulder, and he smells like a woodsy aftershave. It's a comforting scent. They watch the movie in silence.

"How's Fujin?" she asks after a long while, when the plot has become too predictable for her to bear.

Seifer shrugs. "No change, really. I didn't get to talk to Rai for very long, though, so I don't know all the details." He reaches for another beer, and drops the bent lid onto the table with a metallic clatter. She settles back into place against him.

"No news is good news, usually, right?"

He shrugs again. "Maybe."

_Maybe not. _

Seifer plucks at the cuff of her blouse. "You look nice," he says after a while. "Exciting day?"

"Not really. Just... felt like it, I guess."

"Oh."

Onscreen, the plot twist has just been revealed. She isn't surprised. Quistis drinks, and sets her empty bottle on the floor, then sits up long enough to grab a second one. The pizza remains untouched. She isn't hungry- she can't remember the last thing she ate, either, which probably isn't a good thing.

The beer warms her, though. Quistis reaches back to pull the clip out of her hair, shaking it out so it cascades over her shoulders, then rolls so her head is on Seifer's thigh and she is staring at the ceiling. It's not a very interesting ceiling, she decides. She closes her eyes instead of having to look at it.

Seifer draws his fingers through her hair, smoothing it back away from her face. The motion is soothing, repetitive, and mindless. Exactly what she needs.

Exactly what she doesn't want, some mindless repetitive _soothing _goddamned thing like she is a child.

She sits up and plucks Seifer's beer bottle out of his hand, setting it aside on the coffee table, and tugs him towards her. She doesn't think about what she's doing. She doesn't _want _to. She's tired of thinking, of planning. No one's life is in her hands anymore, she can't decide anyone's fate.

_xx_

The movie is utterly forgotten. Her kiss is desperate, frantic.

"What-" Not that he's entirely _against _this turn of events, but...

"Shut up," she murmurs against his lips.

He shuts up.

Quistis tugs at the hem of his shirt. Seifer yanks it over his head and tosses it elsewhere, and goes to work on the buttons on her blouse. Her bra is beige, unadorned, and he tugs the strap of it down her arm to kiss her shoulder.

She pulls at his belt. He slides his hand up the hem of her skirt.

The couch isn't big enough. Seifer's foot nearly takes out the lamp on the end table; Quistis grabs his hand and pulls him up off of the couch. They half-run, half-drag each other up her narrow stairwell. He stops her against a wall to kiss her.

Her bedroom is pristine, the bed precisely made up. She shoves him back onto the bed, unzipping her skirt and kicking it off somewhere behind her. She is beautiful in the twilight streaming through the curtains. Seifer pulls her down to him; Quistis' arms twine around his neck.

"Your implant still works, right?" he gasps into her ear. She nods- thank _god. _He doesn't know if he would be able to walk away if he had to. Seifer presses his lips to the hollow of her throat, and eases her back down onto the bed.

"_Seifer,_" she breathes. His name from her lips is a balm, a blessing. Seifer runs his hands down her torso and she arches into his touch.

_xx_

Afterward, she sits on the edge of the bed, combing her fingers through the knots in her hair. Behind her, Seifer is dozing, sprawled out across half of the mattress, his fingers grazing the small of her back. She looks back at him. He sleeps with his mouth slightly open, the bed sheet drawn haphazardly across his waist. There is a tattoo on his right shoulder, the SeeD emblem outlined in dark ink. She wonders what possessed him to get that symbol etched into his skin, an indelible reminder of his past. But she remembers his boasting- _I'll be the greatest knight—_and wonders instead what he thinks whenever he sees the tattoo in the mirror.

Garden had failed him, just as it has failed her, tormented by a panel of headmasters and admirals, people who know _nothing _about the Quistis Trepe that isn't battle plans and Instructorship. All they know is that she has failed whatever miserable little test this was, and they throw her out like so much garbage. _Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Miss Trepe. _

Quistis rises, and walks out of the bedroom silently, slipping into the bathroom and locking the door behind her. For once, her shower doesn't take forever to heat up the water; she steps under the spray, leaning against the tiled wall until she finds herself sitting in the tub with the water beating down on her head. She doesn't know how she got down there, but she stays, and she feels like she should cry. But she feels only emptiness in her chest, where she thinks her heart should be.


	5. five

_five. _

He wakes up at two in the morning, startled out of sleep by a noise or the edge of a dream. The bed is unfamiliar for a long moment; it's facing the wrong way, and the moonlight cuts a line across alien furniture. When he rolls over, he is alone in the large bed. The second pillow is smooth, undented.

Seifer gets up, groping around on the floor until he finds his boxers, then his jeans. He dresses quickly, and then pads barefoot out into the dark hall, down the stairway. The television is still on, playing an infomercial. His shirt is obscuring half of the screen- Seifer retrieves it and pulls it on.

"Quistis?" he calls.

"Out here," she replies from somewhere near the back of the house. Seifer follows the sound of her voice until he comes to an open sliding glass door that exits onto a postage-stamp sized backyard. Quistis is sitting in a plastic lawn chair, a mug of something cupped in her hands.

"Hey," he says, and it feels awkward, casual conversation with a woman he has just slept with for the first time. It's been so long since he's done this dance. Seifer lurks in the doorway; what's the proper protocol for this shit, anyway?

"Hi."

"What's going on out here?"

"Nothing terribly exciting." Quistis sips at her drink. "It's a nice night."

"Uh-huh." He leans against the doorjamb, crossing his arms.

"There's more coffee on, if you want some."

He shrugs. "Nah. I'm good. I should probably get going, anyway. I have work in the morning."

"Okay."

"Alright." He takes the two steps towards her and touches her head. Her hair is damp and loosely braided. Quistis leans back and looks up at him.

"I'm fine, Seifer," she says, answering his unspoken question. "Just... not tired."

He nods. "Okay," he echoes. "I'll, uh, call you later, then."

She smiles and he leans down to kiss her forehead. It takes him five minutes to find his stuff, because his wallet is buried under Quistis' blouse and his keys are hidden beneath the pizza box lid. His phone tells him that he's missed no calls and has no new messages. _No news is good news_, so Seifer lets himself out the front door, into the still Dollet night.

_xx_

He is asleep almost as soon as his head hits his pillow, and awoken what seems like seconds later by the shrieking of his alarm clock. Daylight filters through his blinds. It really _is _seven-thirty, then. Seifer stretches, feeling things pop and pull all down his spine. He wonders if Quistis ever went to bed, and hauls himself out of the warmth of his bed to make a pot of coffee.

It takes two cups of the stuff before he feels like a functioning adult, and he pours the rest of the pot into a travel mug just before he heads out the door. One of his neighbors, an elderly woman, is already up, shuffling down the hall with a large bag of trash. Seifer jogs to catch up with her.

"Let me help," he says. Mrs. Rhee smiles gratefully at him, and hands him the bag. She pats his arm with a hand that feels as delicate as paper; she has been living in this building since it was built. She is, perhaps, one of the only people who doesn't automatically hate him on sight. It helps that she doesn't read the papers, he thinks, and he has never volunteered the information.

"You're a good man," she tells him. "I was just telling my sister that the other day, what a good man you are." She smiles at him broadly. "She's single, you know. Eighty-six years young this March."

Seifer shoves the bag into the trash chute and chuckles. "I appreciate the offer, Mrs. Rhee."

"Heartbreaker," she scolds him, and toddles back down the hall. "You say hello to that pretty blonde girl for me," she calls back over her shoulder. "She seems nice."

He shuts the door to the trash chute, then takes a long pull of his coffee.

_Nice. _

He supposes that's one word to describe Quistis Trepe.

_xx_

The work is mindless, repetitive, the phone ringing all he hears some days after walking out of the building. Seifer picks up one call, transfers it to another department, puts four people on hold, and endures an Estharian woman screaming at him in broken Standard for five minutes before he ends up transferring _her _to his supervisor, because he cannot make heads or tails of what she's asking for. It doesn't bother him, though. Not like it normally would.

Seifer leans back in his chair and drops the horribly uncomfortable headset around his neck. He hates this fucking job.

His cell phone buzzes- there is an email from a scrambled forwarding address. Seifer opens it quickly, scanning the contents.

Talk about a mood-killer. Seifer puts the work phone on standby and gets up out of his chair as the clock ticks over to eleven. Lunch break.

"You're in a hurry," his shift supervisor comments as Seifer passes him in the corridor, heading toward the time clock.

"I've got- errands," Seifer says.

"I got your request for Friday off," Martins says. "You're spending a lot of time out of town this month."

Seifer shrugs. "I've got the time to use."

Martins scribbles something in the folder in his hands. "Yes, but it affects the needs of the business if we can't count on you to be here on a regular basis."

"Look, it's just for a little while," Seifer says. "I swear." Just until his best friend is dead.

Sometimes, and he'll never say this out loud, he imagines taking his computer keyboard to Martins' face. A faint smirk flickers at the edges of his mouth.

The clock is ticking. Martins regards him curiously for a moment.

"I sincerely hope you won't make a habit out of it."

Seifer nods and skirts around the other man, walking quickly to the stairwell. Seifer jogs down the three flights, out into the street. Dollet is always busy around lunch time, tourists finally coming off of the beach to feed, or mindless corporate drones like himself escaping cramped offices for the briefest period until five o' clock. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials the number from memory.

The phone call is terse, an acceptance of terms and an agreed-upon completion date. He doesn't care about the details- apparently she stole a million gil from a children's hospital fund. It doesn't matter. The pay is the important part. She is in Timber. They don't care how he takes care of her.

The arrangements take up the entirety of his break. He makes sure to delete the number from his phone's history.

Seifer presses a button on his cubicle phone, taking it off of stand-by, and slips the headset back around his ears.

Fuck, he's _starving_, he thinks, and wonders if he'll have a minute to sneak out to the vending machine down the hall between calls.

_xx_

Seifer is already seated at a booth in the back corner of the restaurant, working his way through a massive hamburger, when Quistis arrives. She slides into the slick vinyl seat across from him, and steals one of the fries.

"Hey," he says, around a mouthful of burger, "get your own."

She flags down a waitress and orders a salad and an iced tea.

"Sorry," he says. "I'm goddamned starving. I missed lunch."

"Busy day?" she asks. The waitress returns with her drink. She squeezes the lemon into the tea, and stirs it with her straw.

He shrugs. "Yeah."

"Exciting."

"Not fucking really." Seifer sets down the last quarter of his burger and wipes his fingers on his napkin. "You?"

"Went for a run."

Stared at the news for an hour without really seeing the screen. Took a nap that didn't make her any more rested. Grocery shopped so absently that she surprised herself when all she came home with was a quart of milk, a half-dozen eggs and a bag of chocolate chips. What was she planning on doing? Baking cookies?

Quistis picks up the wrapper of her straw and toys with it, twisting it around in her hands until it snaps apart.

"Quistis," he says, and she doesn't know if he's been saying her name for a while, or what. She looks up. Seifer frowns at her, his brow furrowed.

"When the hell was the last time you slept?" he asks. "You're completely out of it."

"I don't- know," she says, and surprises herself with the answer.

"Sure as shit wasn't last night."

_No. It sure as shit wasn't. _

She has seen dawn too many times this week to be comfortable with. Maybe she's in shock, from Garden throwing her out. But she's been out of Garden for a long time- she had _known_, when Xu sat her down in the office the day she came back from Centra, that this was the end. She hadn't wanted to admit it. Now she can't escape it. Three cadets are dead, and she's out of a job. Out of her life's work, the only thing she's ever had, the only thing she could depend on, because she failed not once, but twice. It's becoming a habit with her, failure.

Now she's sitting in a booth in a crappy restaurant with a man whom she's sleeping with, but only because she got too close. Because _Garden _told her to. The only person she can count on in the whole wide world is a former sorceress' lapdog, and their entire relationship is built on a lie.

"Jeez," he says finally, and takes a swig of his drink.

Her salad arrives. She pokes at it with the fork, listlessly digging through the limp lettuce until she spears a tomato slice. She puts it in her mouth, chewing slowly, trying to draw out the business of eating to keep Seifer from commenting on how screwed up _Instructor _Trepe has become.

It's pathetic, she realizes, when at one point, Seifer reaches across the table and squeezes her hand, that he might be better adjusted than she is.

_xx_

Two days later, Seifer works his fingers down her spine, easing out a series of knots in her muscles with his knuckles, and Quistis murmurs a little pleased noise. She's been drifting in and out for the past few minutes, closing her eyes only long enough to realize she has drifted off, then opens them again. Under his ministrations, it's almost impossible to stay awake.

She doesn't want to sleep. That's why she took up his casual invitation to come back to his place after meeting for coffee, where he tells her he's going out of town for a couple of days.

His touch is light, practiced. Idly, she wonders where he learned to be so gentle. It's so... contradictory. She tucks her head in the crook of her elbow. This is nice. She wants to stay in this moment for a long time, to keep the real world on stand-by just a little bit longer.

Seifer slides his hands across her back, his palms cool against her skin. She's very comfortable, really. Seifer lies down next to her, long and leonine in the dim lamplight. Quistis looks at him for a while, her eyes heavy-lidded. He traces lines across her shoulder with one finger, and she swears she hears him sigh. Maybe she's imagining it.

The dream crashes in before she can stop it, and like always, it comes in a haze of red.

The red of Centra's sands, the red of the stone building, the red of blood and the red, red, red that echoes through her head, the screams drowning out everything.

She jerks away from the surveillance cameras and tries to run out of the van, toward her team that _needs _her, but she reaches an invisible barricade, and she cannot reach the door handle. It stretches farther away from her the closer she tries to get, and she claws for it, pushing against the barricade with all that she has. It does not give, not at all. She lashes out.

Her fist meets something solid, and is rewarded with an explosion of profanity.

Quistis goes stock-still. When her world finally resolves itself, Seifer is sitting up next to her with one hand clamped over his jaw.

"Seifer-" She reaches for him, and he jerks his head away from her touch. "I- God, I'm sorry-"

He presses gingerly on his skin. "You've got a hell of a right hook, Trepe." She can already tell from the way he winces that her ill-placed punch is going to leave a bruise. Some small part of her congratulates her on not breaking anything in his face; she's more than capable of it, when she aims. Zell taught her well.

"I'm _sorry_," she repeats, and the word is hopelessly inadequate. She gets up out of his bed and wraps her arms around herself, goose bumps welling up on her bare flesh; the cold makes her fold up on herself, and she sits on the carpet, her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin tucked in toward her chest. "_Dammit!" _she exclaims.

"Quistis-" and the way he says her name, she knows he forgives her. He shouldn't. She's a bloody mess.

His footsteps reverberate through the floor. He crouches next to her. A blanket goes around her shoulders, the warm, soft, over-washed comforter from his bed. She clutches at the edge of the fabric and draws it tighter around her.

Seifer puts his arms around her. He shouldn't touch her. Her failure's probably contagious.

She leans into him, and he rocks her gently, and she cries, finally, her sobs pathetic noises that want to be screams.

She doesn't know if she can survive this for much longer.

_xx_

He doesn't know what the fuck to do.


	6. six

_six. _

The office is exactly like what she expected, a small, comfortable seat for her, a clock ticking out the hour on the wall. To emphasize the importance of time, there is even an hourglass on the fancy glass table. She picks it up and turns it over, watching the sand filter down into the bottom bulb.

The doctor sits across from her, a notepad in her lap, and asks her the routine questions- what do you do, what do you hope to accomplish.

She _does _nothing. She hopes to accomplish sleeping through the night again.

The doctor asks her about her diet and exercise routine, if she's always been naturally this thin, if she's eating a regular set of meals.

Coffee, mostly. Takeout. She doesn't like to cook. She isn't very good at it.

What about her friends? Does she see any of them?

No. Not anymore. Seifer is the only one she talks to on a regular basis, and that's so screwed up now that she wouldn't be surprised if he never wanted to see her again.

Quistis holds the hourglass in her hands, tilting it right to left, watching the sand slide back and forth. No one keeps in touch anymore.

Interpersonal relationships are important.

She thinks about what Seifer said to her, as they were getting dressed before he had to go to work. _You should see someone, Quistis. _

_You think I'm crazy. _It's not a question. She knows she's messed up.

_I don't think you're crazy- I think you... shit, I think you should just talk to someone objective. _

Objective is what drives her uptown to this posh doctor's office. _Objective _is a stranger trying to get her to spill her innermost secrets.

The clock ticks, ticks, ticks, and the hour is over almost before it has begun.

"Okay," her therapist says. "I want to prescribe you something for your insomnia. I think you'll find that you'll feel much better when you're able to sleep at night. I'd also like to give you something to help stabilize your mood. I don't want to say you're depressed, but-"

"I'm not depressed," Quistis interjects. "I'm just stressed out."

"Quistis," and the way the doctor says her name, it's like they're old friends. It makes Quistis bristle a little. "I've treated a number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases, many of them former members of Garden. Depression is very common in these cases, oftentimes stemming from a loss of purpose or drive in one's life. It's nothing to be embarrassed about." She scribbles out two prescriptions and passes the slips of paper across the space between them.

Quistis folds them up and puts them in her pocket.

"I would very much like to keep seeing you. I think we could really work out some of your inner demons, and help your relationship with your boyfriend."

That is a label she would never apply to Seifer. It doesn't fit him, but she supposes that's what it must look like to any idiot observer.

"I'll have to check my schedule," Quistis says neutrally. She stands up and brushes a piece of lint off of her slacks. "Thank you."

"I do hope you'll choose to come back," the therapist says.

_Don't hold your breath. _

When she walks out into the sunny day, shielding her eyes against the abrupt brightness until she has a chance to root her sunglasses out from her purse, she is greeted by a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper of her car. When she opens it, she finds that she owes Dollet Dukedom three hundred gil for driving with expired Garden plates. She groans. _Seriously?_

She stops at the pharmacy on the way home, and fills both prescriptions. The pills are blue and pink, oblong and tiny rounds respectively. She handles them as if they are grenades.

_xx_

He tracks a woman down in Timber and kills her, snapping her neck with such practiced ease it's as easy as opening a jar.

He feels nothing. He leaves her corpse in the entryway of her home, for her maid to find. The police have no leads, no suspect.

His bank account is padded with three thousand gil. Seifer takes most of it out and gives it to Raijin. He won't take no for an answer.

The bruise that forms on his jaw isn't as bad as he thought it would be, a narrow streak of purple that begins to fade fairly quickly. He's surprised by how often he forgets about it.

Fujin inquires after his love life in a sentence that takes three times as long to say as it should, because she has to keep stopping to draw breath from the oxygen mask.

He tells her everything is fine. _Fine _has become his cover story. She has too much harsh truth in her own life to need to deal with his problems.

Fujin demands a hug from him. When he leans over the hospital bed and puts his arms around her, she weighs nothing. She is already a ghost. Three months, hell. She'll be lucky if she makes it a- _you are the worst fucking human being if you finish that goddamned thought, _he tells himself. But all it takes is one look at Raijin, and he knows it is the truth.

"How long?" he asks. Raijin shrugs.

"They don't know. She's not getting any better. It's just... what'd they call it? Wait-and-see time."

_Fuck. _He bangs his fist against the clean white wall. "Does she know?"

"Yeah. She's- she keeps saying she's not afraid, you know?"

Fujin has never been afraid of anything, and that's what brought them together in the first place, when he needed a willing cadet to release a grat into the girls' dormitory hall. _Wuss_, she tells him, but the next morning, she and Raijin sit down with him at breakfast like they've been friends since the dawn of time.

God, how the hell long has it been, anyway? Sixteen years since they formed their "posse"?

Time is too fucking fleeting for him.

_xx_

Quistis calls him, and tells him she has an appointment. Does he need a ride from the ferry?

He tells her he's going to catch a cab and maybe just crash. He feels the faintest twinge of guilt. He smothers it.

The train gets delayed just outside of Deling City. When the ferry finally bumps the dock in Dollet, there is an enormous crush of people waiting at the cab stand. Seifer shoulders his bag and starts the long walk home.

He pulls a beer out of the fridge, and sits in front of the TV, and doesn't drink.

Seifer wonders what Garden would do if he tried to move. Would they stop him? Do they even give a shit about him anymore?

He leaves the beer sitting on his crappy little end table, and stalks out of his apartment.

_xx_

Seifer walks for so long he ends up going in circles and passes the Roast twice before he gives up, going inside. He takes his coffee to a booth. He pours in his half-pack of sugar, and shreds the remains of the wrapper into a tiny pile in front of him. When Seifer realizes what he is doing, he wraps his hands around the cup instead, just to keep them still. The heat floods through his palms. He drinks until he runs out of coffee, then sets the cup aside and rests his face in his hands. He wants to backtrack to last month, before he ever ran into Trepe. He wants to backtrack to last _year_, before Fujin found out she was dying, and he started killing people to save her.

If he's being honest with himself, and it seems like it's a really fucking good time to start doing that, Seifer would admit that he would like to backtrack to a rainy evening, in a rock quarry, where this whole damn mess of his life started when he swung down Hyperion's blade and ripped Leonhart's face open.

This is _pathetic. _This isn't him. He has no regrets (too many regrets). Seifer slides out of the booth and tosses his empty cup into the trashcan by the door.

Home is dark and empty and fucking lonely as hell. He picks up the beer bottle from the table, and puts it back in the fridge. His shirt goes over his head and onto the floor somewhere; he doesn't care. Seifer trades his jeans for a loose pair of sweatpants. Sleep is a long fucking time in coming. Every time he looks at the clock, it has advanced by only minutes. Nine-fifteen. Nine forty-two. Ten-oh-one. Sometime around eleven-thirty-seven, his brain finally slows down enough to let him rest.

He ignores his alarm in the morning, and calls in sick. Before the human resources rep can inquire any further, Seifer hangs up. He doesn't care. Let them fire him. It's not like the job means anything to him.

At ten, he thinks that maybe he should get up.

At eleven-twelve, he still hasn't moved.

At noon, he rolls out of bed listlessly, showers, shaves, and scrapes some butter on a piece of toast before he realizes he isn't really that hungry. He drops the toast on a plate and carries it and his coffee back into his living room. He really ought to get a proper table. He really ought to do a lot of things.

At twelve-thirty, he discovers that they're airing a marathon of Laguna Loire's _The Sorceress' Knight _movies. It surprises him a little to find he still knows almost all of the scenes verbatim.

At two-fifteen, he gets up to take a piss. The movies have gone to commercial. He turns off the TV and stretches out on the sofa.

At two-twenty-eight, he wonders idly what Quistis is doing, because he's bored out of his skull.

At three, he gets a phone call, and it startles him out of his pseudo-nap, stretched out on the sofa with his arm serving as a pillow. It is Raijin.

At three-oh-two, his entire world falls apart.

_xx_

It is raining again in Dollet Dukedom, and there is someone pounding on her door like they want to break it down.

Quistis answers it. Seifer is standing there, his fist raised to beat on her door again. He looks surprised to find her there instead, and lowers his hand.

"Seifer? What are you doing here?"

"Can I come in?" he asks. "I'm getting soaked."

"Where's your coat?"

He shrugs. "It, uh, it wasn't raining when I left."

It had started raining four hours ago. She wonders what on earth he has been up.

She goes to the bathroom and returns with a towel, pressing it into his hands. Seifer holds it like he's not entirely sure what it is. Quistis slips behind him and closes her front door. The lock makes a gentle click when she twists it into place.

"Oh. You should've called. I was just about to go pick up dinner."

"I left my phone at home. Sorry." Seifer doesn't move, though, still standing in her foyer, dripping onto her hardwood floors, strangling the towel between his fingers. His stillness worries her.

"Do you want some tea?"

Seifer nods, slowly, and walks with her into the kitchen. The kettle is still full enough for one more cup, so she pours the hot water into a mug.

"What kind?"

A shrug. "Doesn't matter."

She settles on an herbal blend. The smell of mint fills the air as she dunks the bag into the scalding water. "Here you go."

He drops the towel onto her counter and takes the tea. He doesn't thank her, and instead he juts his chin in the direction of the pill bottles still sitting on the counter. "What're those?"

"Medication." She shrugs. "I went to see a doctor. They thought it would help me... sleep."

She doesn't know what the hell she expects out of his mouth- _congratulations, _a pat on the back, a laugh about her in therapy even though it was his stupid suggestion in the first place. But Seifer doesn't say anything, just continues to stare at the little bottles like they are the last things on earth. She reaches out and sweeps them into the drawer. The motion startles him.

"Seifer, what are you really doing here?" she asks finally.

He scowls. "I can't come see you, now?"

"You kind of blew me off last night," Quistis reminds him. "As nice as it is to see you, I wasn't expecting it. I have a life, too."

"Yeah, well, sorry. I was tired. I didn't mean to interrupt your busy social schedule." His voice is sharp, unnecessarily harsh. She leans back against the counter, wrapping her fingers around the edges of the smooth wood, and regards him.

"I don't want to fight with you, Seifer."

"I wasn't fighting." He looks surprised at the suggestion; she isn't surprised. _Defensive _is Seifer's default setting. "I said I was sorry."

Quistis sighs. "Seifer, I-" She stops when she sees his face, his tightly clenched jaw. "Are you alright?"

There is an almost imperceptible shift of his head, and she knows, then, what has brought him to her on this rainy Monday afternoon. Quistis sets aside her cup. "Oh, god," she whispers. "Fujin-"

Seifer looks at her, then, when she says his friend's name, and there's such a hollow look in his eyes that it frightens her, because she knows that look. It's her own face in the wake of Centra, her entire universe collapsing down into nothing and leaving her empty.

There is nothing to say, so instead, she wraps her arms around him. He sags into her embrace, and it takes all of her strength to keep them both on their feet.

_xx_

It is this final trip into Galbadia that takes forever; the gentle rolling motion of the train makes him nauseous. He doesn't understand how Quistis can sit there so calmly and read her book, turning the pages like the world hasn't gone to shit around them.

The funeral is a blur. He remembers Raijin losing it in the middle of his eulogy. He remembers talking to Fujin's parents, who have flown in from Esthar to see their only child put into the ground. He doesn't remember what he says to them.

There are too many roses; Fujin hates roses. The scent is cloying, all he can smell. All he will ever be able to smell. At least it drowns the scent of hospital antiseptic from his nose.

The memorial photograph is from the honeymoon she and Raijin took in Balamb, where she is smiling at the camera, her hair whipped around her face by a breeze. Her eyes are covered by giant black sunglasses. It is a happy photo.

Seifer studies the picture for the entire viewing service.

Quistis sits next to him at the graveside, in a crisp black dress. She puts her hand on his knee at one point, and he wraps his fingers around hers reflexively. He doesn't cry. He's too drained to cry. He's never cried, not since his stupid pet hamster died when he was seven.

Raijin does, though, weeping into his hands the entire time, slumped in the seat on Seifer's other side. He doesn't know what to say to Rai. They hug for a long time after, when the service is over. Seifer promises to visit more.

He doesn't know if he'll be able to stand to return to Deling City, now that there's no Fujin anymore.

They navigate Galbadia's ridiculous bus transfers. He doesn't remember exactly how he got where he is now, sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bed, wearing these black, pressed clothes. His tie is a noose. Seifer rips it off and flings it across the room. His dress shoes get the same treatment, banging off the beige wall in two distinct thuds. Quistis takes out her earrings, and watches him in the mirror. He feels drunk. He remembers having a bourbon at the bar in the lobby. Maybe two.

He cannot remember.

She takes forever in the bathroom. When she comes out, she's wearing one of the hotel's fluffy white robes, her hair hanging in damp waves around her face.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asks.

"No." He never, _ever _wants to talk about this. He wants to go home and pretend that this hasn't happened. That Fujin gets her promised three months, that she goes into remission, that she doesn't get the goddamned _disease _in the first place. He wants to go back downstairs and keep drinking, until he he can't feel the numbness that has wrapped itself around him.

He wants, he wants-

He turns his head and Quistis is still standing there

The belt on her robe is knotted loosely. He plucks at it, letting the belt fall to either side. She doesn't stop him. Seifer draws her to him, resting his head against her flat stomach. Quistis strokes the hair at the base of his neck, running her fingers through the strands. He kisses her just above her navel, and her fingers still. His hands wrap around her hips. She hooks a finger beneath his chin and presses her lips to his forehead, on the faded thread of scar tissue that runs between his eyes.

"I'm so sorry, Seifer," she whispers, and there is a lump in his throat that he doesn't know how to handle. He can't _breathe_ around it.


	7. seven

_seven. _

He is not gentle, and for that, she is grateful.

She is left trembling, fighting to catch her breath as Seifer collapses against her, his breath hot in the hollow of her throat. Her name comes out of his mouth like an obscenity. Her lips graze the side of his head. The room is too warm, and he is so heavy, but she does not push Seifer away.

She cannot push him away. Not now. Not like this.

(She doesn't know if she could _ever _push him away.)

Seifer lays his head on her breast, and she is sure he can hear the hammering of her heart. His eyes are closed. She runs her nails gently across the nape of his neck. He makes a noise, a rumbling sound that echoes through her skin, and he lifts her hand from his neck and presses his mouth to her palm. The smile that comes is fleeting.

He murmurs something.

She asks him to repeat it. Seifer declines.

Eventually, she eases him off of her, and pads into the hotel's bright bathroom. The light is garishly bright- it leaves spots dancing on her eyes for a few seconds. Her shower is short. It takes ten minutes to blow-dry her hair into a reasonable state.

A quick perusal of her toiletry kit gives up her toothbrush and the bottle of sleeping pills.

She is exhausted, too exhausted to deal with dreams she cannot control. She swallows one of them with a cupped palmful of water from the sink. It leaves a metallic aftertaste. Quistis brushes her teeth briskly.

Seifer gives every impression of being already asleep, curled up against the wall with his back to her, the blanket tugged carelessly over his hips; when she touches him, he doesn't stir. The pillow is soft under her head, and Quistis draws the unfamiliar covers up to her chest. It takes longer than she expects for the pill to do its work; eventually, she gives up and closes her eyes. She expects a flash of red, the report of a gunshot. A car backfires outside the hotel. The drug washes over her, dragging her down into oblivion.

If she dreams, she doesn't remember them.

In the early hours of the morning, she hears a phone start ringing somewhere in the distance, and feels Seifer's weight shift across the bed. There is muffled conversation, an emphatic _no_, and the thud of plastic on wood as he drops the phone back down. One arm comes around her waist, his face tucks against her neck.

"Who?" she mumbles, lifting her head off the pillow. She cannot manage the action for very long—she is so _tired. _

"No one."

She falls back asleep, his other arm her new pillow, inhaling the scent of him.

_xx_

The trip back to Dollet is uneventful. Seifer spends the entire time looking out the window, watching the scenery fly by, his cell phone out in his lap like he's intending to make a call any moment. He never does. The phone never rings, either. He simply holds it, the black rectangle hanging loosely from his hands. She keeps waiting for him to drop it.

She flips through a magazine she picked up at the train station, and quickly tires of it, tossing it on the empty seat next to her. A woman across the way inquires if she can look at it. Quistis tells her to keep it. She misses the SeeD car, the privacy and comfort. Travel is not her favorite thing.

Quistis plucks at a stray thread on her somber gray blouse, rolling it between her fingers until she flicks it away between the seats. Seifer glances at her, and looks away a second later. Grief is awful on him, a heaviness around his shoulders and a dimming of his eyes, as if a light within him has been extinguished.

Seifer speaks to her only a few times the entire trip; the first is when he shakes her awake at their arrival in the Balamb station. She gathers her bags and follows him off the train. It is a beautiful day in her former hometown, and everything still looks the same to her. She isn't sure what changes she expected to happen in a month. Her entire life has flipped upside down, and Balamb remains steadfastly entrenched in its ways.

At one point, they pass a group of cadets, all of whom slow and stare and whisper; Seifer hunches his shoulders and ignores them.

She wonders what rumors have spread in her absence. Garden is notorious for gossip, and together, she and Seifer make one hell of a scandal. The disgraced hero, the failed knight. Quistis tucks her hand in Seifer's, meeting the aghast look of the leader of the group, until the teenage girl ducks her head and leads her friends on down the road.

The second isn't until they're waiting for the ferry and he tells her he's hungry. He stalks off to the tiny snack shop; he comes back with a cardboard box of greasy fried seafood and a fruit smoothie for her. It is too sweet for her taste, but she takes a few sips of it in appreciation of the gesture.

In Dollet, they part ways with a tight embrace at the corner of her street. He tells her he'll call her later. She tells him not to worry about it, but she'll be around if he needs to talk.

She watches him go until he disappears into the crowd, and Quistis turns her feet for home.

Her bed is lonely and cold, and at three in the morning, she gives up and takes another one of the blue pills. She doesn't wake up until after noon, when nausea wells up in her gut. The bottle's label says it is a side effect.

_xx_

On the last night of his leave from his day job, Seifer gets an email with a name and a number in it. He deletes it without opening it. There's no point. He doesn't need their money anymore, now that Fujin is in the ground. Their money was supposed to save _her _life, and it didn't. They failed him. He will not forgive them.

He will certainly not forget.

For now, though, he checks off the message and thumbs the tiny trashcan-shaped icon. There is a satisfying noise of crumpling paper as the message is erased- bless whomever invented sound effects.

Seifer shuts off his phone and sets it aside, next to his plate. He's no one's little errand boy. If they've got a problem with the temporary nature of this arrangement, they can take it up with someone else who gives a shit.

Quistis pushes aside her plate after poking at it with her fork for a while, and says that she doesn't feel very well, sliding her chair back from the table. There are takeout containers strewn across its surface, and Seifer spears another piece of chicken with his fork. He doesn't miss Quistis clamping her hand over her mouth as she practically runs from the room. There is the distant slam of the bathroom door.

She is gone a long time, and when she returns, she looks a little rougher around the edges than when she had left.

"You okay?" he asks.

She takes her seat, and picks up her glass of water, takes a small sip, and frowns. "I think it's those meds I've been taking. Or maybe it's just something I ate." She dabs at her mouth with her napkin.

He refrains from pointing out that she maybe ate two whole bites of the meal, and therefore, probably _isn't _something she ate. He can't remember the last meal he's seen her finish. She eats like a damn bird, picking at crumbs.

Later, he leaves her curled up on the sofa with the trash can from her bathroom within arm's reach, a bottle of water, and a cool towel draped over her forehead, with the end credits of some awful movie playing, and lets himself out. When he texts her in the morning, during a stolen break where he hides out in the restroom, she says she feels a hundred percent better. He tells her to take it easy.

She tells him to do the same.

_xx_

There is mail waiting for her when she ascends her front steps later that morning, back from the grocery store with two bags full of things, a whole mess of letters crammed into her mailbox and threatening to overflow. Quistis unlocks the door, setting the bags inside, and pulls out the pile. She drops the mail on the counter in the kitchen, and takes a moment to brew a pot of coffee.

There are six junk circulars in the pile that she immediately discards, fourteen postcard advertisements for the craft fair next weekend, three bills that don't need to be paid until the end of the month, and one long cream-colored envelope bearing the crest of Garden. Her address is typed in neat black ink precisely in its center. There is no return address; the postage is from Balamb. The post date is from four weeks ago, and the letter is battered around the edges- she wonders what on earth they have sent her that required physical mail, and not Garden's usual practice of email.

Oh, right. They deactivated her email account when they threw her out. She'd almost forgotten.

Quistis ignores the rest of the stuff and tears the envelope open.

The letterhead on the heavy paper is from Garden's medical insurance company. The date printed in the upper left corner is two days before what the postmark says. She skims its contents, expecting it to be a form letter regarding the severance of her medical coverage. It is not- it _is _a form letter, but it is a notification that her birth control implant was deactivated on the twentieth of last month, per inactive SeeD regulations and her insurance billing cycle. It advises her to continue her healthcare with a non-Garden network primary care physician. There is a contact number that she can call if she has any questions.

She looks up at the calendar. It is the nineteenth. It doesn't take a genius to do the math.

Mechanically, she pours the coffee into a mug, and lifts it to her lips. The first taste is burnt, bitter, and _awful_. She spits it in the sink and rinses her mouth out with water from the tap.

_xx_

When he comes home from what feels like the longest day of work he has ever had, in which everyone, including his insufferable supervisor, asks him how he's doing, how's he holding up, they're all so very sorry to hear about his friend, _oh, look, HR gave you a card_; _if you need anything, just ask._ Seifer stops in the doorway of his apartment, with the feeling that something is wrong.

Someone has been in here.

There is no mess, no clear marker of invasion, but the feeling is still there, that a stranger stood where he stands now, uninvited and unwelcome.

Seifer drops his bag and bolts for the bedroom, feeling like he is following phantom footprints. He rips open the closet door, groping blindly up in the far corner of the shelf. His fingers close around the handle of the lockbox- he yanks it down and keys in the combination.

It is empty.

Seifer stares at the foam padding. It still retains a faint impression of the gun. Maybe if he looks hard enough, it will magically reappear. He can blame it all on sleep deprivation, grief, something, _anything _than what it actually is. They know he has refused their offer, in his simple rebellious act of email deletion.

He dials, and the number comes up as out of service. A polite recorded voice tells him that he should hang up and try again.

Seifer flings the phone onto his bed. It bounces off of the center of the mattress and clatters to the floor, skidding out of sight. "God_dammit_!" he yells. This isn't fucking _happening. _

His phone rings, and he dives for it. The screen says _Instructor_ on it.

"This isn't a great time," he says by way of greeting, shoving the lockbox's lid closed and pushing it onto the carpet. It lands with a hollow thud. He wonders what they're going to do to him, what police station is going to end up with that gun and his name and—

_xx_

She sits on the edge of her bathtub, her forehead resting in her palm.

"We have to talk," she says. "Like, right now."

Seifer tries to tell her that it's _really _not a good time.

She tells him that it's probably _never _going to be a good time for this.

He agrees to meet her in an hour.

Quistis sets her phone down on the closed lid of the toilet and picks up the test that sits next to it. She wills the tiny blue plus sign to turn into something, _anything _else. It stubbornly does not.

She pitches it into the trash.


	8. eight

_A/N: This is the corrected version of Chapter 8. If you have already read 8, I would deeply appreciate it if you would read it again. Thanks!_

* * *

_eight. _

Seifer finds her on the boardwalk, sitting on one of the painted white benches, her arms crossed.

He sits down next to her.

"What's up?" he asks.

She looks at the sea crashing against the sand for a long time before she says anything. He must be hearing things when the words, _I think I'm pregnant_, come out of her mouth.

He rakes his hands back through his hair and exhales slowly. "Are you sure?"

Quistis shrugs. "I took two tests. They said the same thing."

Because, yeah, _this _is exactly what he needs to deal with right now. A cool breeze wraps itself around him, a chilly lover's touch. He hunches his shoulders. "Great," he says, and the word comes out flat. "How?"

"Apparently, when a man and a woman-" and he cannot _believe _that Trepe is sitting here, making a joke about this, a sad, tired joke, but one nonetheless. She doesn't finish it, though, just sighs and uncrosses her arms to pull her hairclip out. "Supposedly, Garden deactivated my implant at the middle of last month. I just got the letter today." She shakes her hair out (he is distracted by the gleam of it, but only for a second) and renders the entire action moot by twisting it up and clipping it back again.

"They could've fucking called you."

"Yeah. They could've. But they didn't have to. And it works both ways, Seifer. We should have-"

"We didn't fucking know." He leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, and glances at her. "What are you going to do?"

Covered in the heather gray of her cardigan, her thin shoulders rise and fall. "I don't know."

Seifer nods tightly. Inside, he thinks he might be screaming.

He isn't sure anymore.

Quistis gets up. "You want to walk for a little bit?"

When he rises, she holds out her hand. He almost doesn't take it. Her tiny, delicate, could-break-a-man's-neck-with-one-twist fingers weave between his. Over and over and over again, he is struck by the _smallness_ of her, like she is withering away before his eyes. They walk down the boardwalk for a while in silence.

It's too bad that this isn't his only problem right now, and as if on cue, his phone buzzes his email notification.

_One last job,_ reads the subject line, and when he taps on the message, there is one line.

_Commander Xu Chang, Balamb Garden, Rank A. _

He backs out of his email and drops his phone back into his pocket; it is only then that Seifer realizes he has stopped walking, and Quistis is a few steps ahead, her head turned back to him.

"Exciting news?"

"Uh, no," he tells her. "Just, um, work stuff."

Seifer doesn't know how much longer he's going to be able to keep lying to her like this. His cell phone is a lead weight in his pocket, and he puts his arm around Quistis' shoulders. She loops her arm around his waist. Her closeness doesn't make him feel any better- there are too many enemies lurking in the shadows.

_xx_

They wind up at her house a lot sooner than Quistis had anticipated.

"Do you mind if I stay?" His question is abrupt; it fills her with a rush of relief that she hadn't known she wanted. She honestly hadn't known _what _to expect, dropping this grenade in between them and pulling the pin. So far, it seems like minimal casualties.

_Maybe it hasn't exploded yet, _a soft sing-song voice whispers in her ear.

"You don't have to ask, Seifer."

How far they have come, in conversations on her front stoop. She unlocks the door; when Seifer steps inside, he looks like he's checking the place out, looking for monsters in the dark. Quistis turns on the foyer light. Everything is exactly how she left it. She doesn't know what he thinks he sees.

She makes a pot of tea. They sit on the sofa with inches of soft beige fabric between them. It feels like a mile.

His phone rings. He ignores it. It rings again. Seifer excuses himself, and goes outside, slamming the front door behind him. When she glances out the window, she can see him pacing back and forth in front of the house, obviously angry. She drinks her tea; it does nothing to relax her.

The door slams again. Seifer hovers in the entryway to the living room.

She sets aside her mug. "Is everything alright?" she asks. The question is unnecessary, with the way he stands there, looking at a blank spot on the wall just above her head.

"Fine," he tells her.

She lets him have the lie, and later, when he gets up to leave around eleven, the kiss he gives her is achingly gentle, lingering, like it's the last time he'll ever see her.

"Talk to me," she whispers. "What's going on?"

He shakes his head.

"Please." The word hangs heavy between them. Seifer touches her face, grazes his thumb across her lips. She grabs his hand and lowers it from her face, holding it between hers in her lap. "I know you're upset about Fujin, but-" _You can't keep shutting me out. _

"It's not that," he interrupts. "It's- shit, stop looking at me like that, okay? I'm fine. I told you. I can take care of myself."

She studies his expression, searching for some hint of his secret. Seifer's mouth wears a scowl, and there are lines between his brows. _Fine _is his cover story; _fine _is what she tells herself every time she looks in the mirror.

"Seifer-"

_Fine_ is the biggest lie they share.

"I have to go," he says. "Get some sleep, okay?"

She lets his hand go, and he gets up from the couch. He doesn't touch her again. He doesn't even say goodnight.

_xx_

There is a package waiting for him when he gets home, a plain box wrapped in brown paper. He digs a steak knife out of the drawer of mismatched cutlery, and slices through the tape.

There is a gun, his gun, the same goddamned one they stole from him. It is pristine, scrubbed free of fingerprints. He opens the thin envelope tucked in next to it- ten crisp, fresh, thousand-gil notes.

"I'm not doing it," he says, when his call connects.

"You don't have a choice."

"It's an impossible job. I wouldn't be able to get anywhere _near _her. They'd have me shot on sight. ."

"I have a half-dozen detectives who would be very happy to have the ballistics report from the gun in your hands."

"I'll tell them you blackmailed me, then."

There is a laugh. "Who are they going to believe? The sorceress' lapdog? Or a fine, upstanding pillar of the community?"

"Why?" he asks. "Why her?"

"She killed my son. My only boy. He's dead because of her."

"She's a fucking _SeeD_. A lot of people are dead because of her, and probably because they deserved it."

"Or the price was right. My son is the only one that matters. You should understand what family means. Congratulations, by the way," the voice continues. "If the rumors are true."

"There aren't any fucking _rumors_-" How the hell would they know what he has just learned? How the _hell—_They were _alone_. There's no fucking way this asshole could…

They know when he's finished a job. They've got to be watching him.

His apartment doesn't seem very secure anymore—it hasn't, not since yesterday. Seifer turns on the sink and lets the water run. It won't do much if there are bugs already recording him. Everything important has already been said.

"Do it. By the end of the month. Or we'll hand you over to Deling City's police department on a silver platter."

There is a smooth click, and then silence.

Seifer hurls his phone against the wall. A dozen plastic bits break off, and when he stalks over to it, the screen has shattered. He drops the useless piece of shit into the garbage. The gun is wrapped in an old dishrag, and then shoved into his messenger bag. He shreds the bills and flushes them down the damn toilet. It is more money than he will make in six months, and he lets it drown.

The walk to the beach takes him almost twenty minutes. He walks until he is past the tourist trap end of the boardwalk, leaving its lights and neon and laughter behind him. The dunes hover like bogeymen; Seifer winds his way between them until he gets to the edge of the shore.

He ejects the clip, taking each bullet and flinging it as hard as he can.

His shoes soak through. Seifer methodically disassembles the gun. Each piece is cast away. His hands are empty. The sea swallows his offerings.

He goes back home.

He doesn't sleep.

At 7:30, his alarm goes off in the bedroom, and he gets up to turn it off. He cuts his chin when he shaves, leaving a thin ribbon of blood winding down his neck. Seifer scrubs it away. He dresses robotically. Shirt, pants, belt, tie. His hip pocket feels naked without the weight of his phone.

Seifer brews a pot of coffee and goes to work. He doesn't know why.

It keeps him distracted for eight hours, and he supposes that's something.

_xx_

The forms are endless, she discovers. They come with prescriptions, a list of recommended supplements, warnings and a serious advisory to knock off drinking her body weight in coffee. Her doctor advises her to change her eating habits, and this is what brings Quistis to pick at a crumbling muffin, sitting in a booth at the Roast, as she pages through the stack of paperwork. She fills out the first page with her name, her birthday (soon, she realizes, with a start. They're already halfway through August. October is practically around the corner), her contact information, allergies— none. They ask for her medication history. She can't remember the number of times she's been in and out of the infirmary for a gunshot or mag poisoning or a fira spell right to her chest, the number of limbs she's broken or twisted or sprained. Her pinky finger on her left hand still doesn't bend correctly from a bar fight (it had started out as a mission) in Trabia.

The second page asks for all of the same information about the father.

She has to check her phone for his number. She knows his apartment (36-F) but not the street address. His birthday is in December. She knows that much.

He sleeps with his mouth open, he doesn't snore, and he folds his clothes before he puts them away. He likes local beers, or is too cheap to buy the fancy stuff. He doesn't go to the movies- it's not worth the expense. He knows all of her buttons to press- he knows that if he kisses her neck, it's enough to make her melt. He's never said that he loves her- at least, not within earshot. He hates his job- she knows his boss' name is Martins, and the man is the biggest jerk, in Seifer's humble opinion. Seifer Almasy doesn't care about politics. He can run a five-minute mile, and does, occasionally, with her.

She doesn't know what allergies he has, or his family history of disease (she is assuming it's the same as hers. It's a big blank square that takes up half the page.) She doesn't know if he's ever had major surgery beyond getting stitched up by Kadowaki, or if he takes anything beyond aspirin for a headache.

Quistis leaves most of the boxes empty, and moves on to the third sheet. The barista, bored with wiping down counters for the sixth time, stops by and asks her if she's done with her plate. Quistis lets her take the half-eaten muffin away. She signs her name more times than she thinks is strictly necessary. The doctor's office is going to end up with more rights to her body than _she _has, if she has authorize anything else. Eventually, she reaches the bottom of the stack.

Quistis gathers up all the pages, slips them back into the blue plastic folder they gave her, and tucks the whole thing into her purse. She roots out her car keys. There are still fifteen minutes left on her parking meter- it seems a waste to leave them, but she backs out of the space anyway. A gray sedan slips in it before she is even really out of the way. _Asshole_, she thinks.

She is making the left onto her street, her turn signal on and the roads clear, when the truck comes out of nowhere.

There is the scream of metal on metal, and she slams her head against the driver's side window, and then there is nothing.


	9. nine

_nine. _

hands grab her, shaking her violently. she is going to throw up. there is the hard sting of a palm against her cheek. a groan slips from her lips, a river of something hot flows down her eye.

_You tell Almasy_

the words are coming from somewhere up; she rolls her eyes in that direction. everything is a film of red, and there are shapes that refuse to resolve themselves into something solid.

_that he finishes the fucking job_

she doesn't know what's going on anymore. there is pounding agony in her head.

_or we're coming back for you_

the hands drop her back against her seat. the fall seems to take an eternity. in the distance, sirens are screaming.

she closes her eyes.

_xx_

He's getting off work, having a half-hearted conversation with the guy from the cubicle next to him, when a tow truck goes past hauling the smashed-up body of a dark green vintage coupe. The car is familiar.

"Man," Aidan says with a whistle. "That sucks. That's a beautiful car."

"Yeah," Seifer replies, distractedly. Where the hell has he seen that car before? The tow truck makes a right at the light. There is a blue and black parking sticker stuck on the back window of the coupe, surprisingly pristine in the ruins.

"There were only, like, three hundred ever made. Now there's less than that, I guess." Aidan chuckles a little. "I didn't know there were any in this town, though."

_Shit. _

"Hey," Seifer says abruptly. "Let me borrow your phone."

He dials the number from memory. Quistis' cell rings and rings and rings and finally clicks over to voicemail: _This is Quistis Trepe. Please leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can._

Seifer does not leave a message. He tosses Aidan the phone; his coworker fumbles and nearly drops it, but Seifer is already halfway up the street without even tossing a _thanks_ over his shoulder.

Quistis' townhouse is silent, dark, and there is a glittering trail of glass and twisted metal tracking a path down the street. He pounds on the door.

There is no answer.

"Quistis!" he yells. "_Quistis!" _

There is the sick twisting of something quite like terror in his gut. She isn't there, he knows, but he beats on the door anyway. Just in case he's wrong, and she's taking a nap or she's in the shower or _something-_

One of her neighbors sticks her head out of their window. "She's not home," the woman tells him sharply. "Quiet down."

He doesn't have time for this bullshit. "Do you know where she _is_?"

"There was an accident. They took her to the hospital almost four hours ago. Now go away."

He runs three blocks before there's a cab, and it's idling at a red light. Seifer rips open the door and climbs in. The cabbie jumps. Seifer tells him to drive.

The ride up the sinuous streets of Dollet takes for-fucking-ever, and when the cab finally pulls to a stop in front of Dollet Medical, Seifer pitches the closest handful of gil he has to the cab fare over the front seat and doesn't wait for his change. Inside, the hospital is quiet, painted in supposedly relaxing tones of taupe and sky blue that do nothing to ease the scent of sickness and fear.

He startles the _shit _out of the receptionist. "I'm looking for Quistis Trepe," he says urgently.

"Spell the last name?"

"T-r-e-p-e- it's not that _hard_, she was brought here, like, four hours ago." He drums his fingers on the counter as the receptionist types. "Come _on,_" he snaps. She glances up at him, her lips pursed.

"I've got her listed in a room on the fourth floor, ward B."

He takes off for the elevators.

_xx_

She is asleep when he rounds the bend, flat on her back in a narrow cot. A heart monitor beeps out the steady rhythm of life. There is something going down a tube into her arm. Seifer crosses the threshold and chokes down the dread that boils up.

Her forehead is a mess of bruises. There is a thick bandage wrapped around her skull. Her chest rises and falls regularly. There is no oxygen mask. She is breathing on her own.

Everything drains out of him in one solid blow as it sinks in that she is _alive. _There is a chair. He sits in it, and it scrapes along the linoleum as it shifts under his weight.

Her eyes flutter open and roll in his direction.

"Oh, good," she murmurs. "Was starting to wonder what happened to you. Told them to call you."

His phone sits at home, in a trash can, in ruins.

"No one called me," he tells her. It's not quite a lie. "What the hell happened?"

Quistis opens her mouth to respond.

"She's a lucky lady." Seifer turns at the sound of the voice, and it is a doctor in a white coat, scrolling through information on a tablet in her hands. "You the husband?"

The word drops from her lips like a bomb, and catches him completely off-guard.

"No," he says. "No, we're not-"

"Boyfriend? Sorry. Your name was on some OBG-YN forms in her bag and I just assumed. Glad someone got in touch with you. We tried calling your cell, but we kept getting your voicemail. Does she have any immediate family we can call? There wasn't anyone listed on her insurance."

Seifer shakes his head. "No. No one else."

Quistis' voice floats up from the bed. "You can talk to him," she mumbles. "It's okay. I consent."

The doctor taps out a note. "Okaaaay," she says, dragging the word out. "The long and short of it is that she's pretty banged up, but most of it's just surface damage. We didn't see any internal injuries, and nothing's broken. She's got a pretty vicious bump on the head, and we're going to keep her for at least twenty-four hours for observation-" The doctor glances over at Quistis, who makes a vaguely protesting noise, "whether she likes it or _not_," she adds. Clearly this conversation has happened before. "Especially considering the fetus. I'm not expecting anything dramatic to happen, but it's protocol with head injuries. She can go home in the afternoon, but someone should be there with her for at least a day or so, because she's going to be pretty dizzy."

"I feel fine," Quistis interjects half-heartedly.

"You feel fine, because you've got some serious painkillers pumping through your system. You're going to hate it when we take you off of those tomorrow. Page the nurses' station if you need anything." The doctor leaves. She closes the door behind her.

Quistis eases up on the pillows, thumbing a control that he cannot see, and the bed raises up a few inches. She looks at him, her blue eyes cloudy with drugs and pain and exhaustion, but her gaze is still intense. Eventually, she says, "Someone ran a stop sign. Ran right into me. Someone who-" and she is fighting for the words, brow furrowing with the effort. "Someone who knows you. Said your name. Said-" But she cannot finish the sentence, and her eyes close again. She reaches up over the narrow metal railing of the cot, and Seifer wraps his hands around hers. Her fingers are freezing. "Seifer-"

"Yeah?"

But she doesn't respond. Her fingers slacken in his, and she is lulled to sleep by the drugs running through her veins.

The knot of fear turns into daggers, stabbing at his insides.

This wasn't some idiot behind the wheel of a car. The starburst of bruises along her temple is a message.

_You're a smart boy. You'll figure it out._

_xx_

In the late hours of the evening, around nine, Seifer rides the elevator up from the basement cafeteria, a cup of awful coffee in his hand.

It's the day that doesn't fucking end, he decides. The elevator doors open onto the fourth floor, and he walks down the hallway. The door to Quistis' room is closed. He opens it quietly. The lights are on, and there is someone in the room with her, a woman who stands with her back to the doorway, talking to Quistis in a low voice. She is wearing a crisp SeeD uniform, with her dark hair cropped short. She turns her head.

Seifer nearly drops his coffee.

"Hello, Almasy," Xu says coolly. "I'd say it was good to see you, but I'm afraid I'd be lying."

"What the _fuck _are you doing here?" he snarls_. _

"I got a very interesting phone call tonight, just as I was about to walk out of my office" she says. "I had to come make sure my friend was okay."

"Get. _Out._"

"No," Xu tells him. Her voice is level, too level for her not to be furious with him. "We need to talk, you and I."

He jerks his head in the direction of the hall. "Outside."

_Do it,_ a voice whispers, _kill her now. Break her neck and leave her in a dumpster somewhere. _

Xu shoves him against the wall once they are outside. The coffee in his hand drops to the floor. He'd forgotten just how strong she is- she's probably fucking Junctioned, though, and capable of killing him with her pinky finger. "You piece of shit," she hisses. "_Pregnant?_ What the _fuck _is wrong with you? Did you just show up one day and think, hmm, hey, I'll ruin Trepe's life?"

"_Fuck_ you," he spits, shoving her back. "It's not any of your goddamned business what she does with her life. She's _done _with Garden, and done with you. You were the ones who threw her out. She didn't have a choice."

Xu laughs, the sound nails on a chalkboard. "Oh, you think she's in love with you by _chance_? That you just happened to be there when she needed someone? We sent her to Dollet. She went to that bar that night because of a _job_. You wouldn't have stood a chance with her otherwise, Almasy."

"She told me she was _out _of Garden," Seifer retaliates. Xu's wrong, she's _lying_, she's doing this just to get under his skin. She was always very fucking good at that.

"She _lied_, you idiot." Xu steps back and adjusts the cuffs of her jacket, smoothing her skirt and straightening her tie. "She lied, and you believed her. Congratulations," she tosses over her shoulder as she walks away. "Tell Quistis I'm going to send a card."

Her back is to him, a clear, perfect target, and he doesn't have a gun.

_xx_

She waits for him to come back into the room for a long time, fighting the urge to sleep, fighting the pain in her face and her arms and her whole damn body.

When he finally does, she is drifting off, and the last thing she sees is his unreadable expression. She wants to tell him something, something important, but she cannot quite put her finger on what it is, and so she just looks at him until his face smears away into green and gold and-


	10. ten

_ten. _

When she wakes up for the second time that morning, she is alone, and the clock on the wall ticks over to ten fifteen. Quistis sits up gingerly, feeling like she's been hit by a truck- _Oh._ The events of yesterday filter back in, photos being dropped back into a box out of order.

The room lurches half a rotation to the right when she rises. There is a bedpan on a cart, just barely within reach. She vomits into the pan, and spends five minutes with her head between her knees until the room stops _moving. _

Someone knocks on the door, a single beat.

"You okay?" It is Seifer. His voice is rough, like he hasn't had enough sleep. When she looks up long enough to acknowledge him, there is a dark shadow across his jaw and neck. He hasn't shaved. He _looks_ like he hasn't slept, either. There's a bag in his hand. The room lurches again.

"Just- give me a minute," Quistis says wearily. She eases herself to her feet. For a miracle, the room stays still. Seifer stands in the doorway, awkwardly, like a damn nervous teenager. She walks on shaking legs to the closet-like bathroom. The nausea slams into her again when she flicks on the over-bright lights. Over the sound of her retching, she hears him ask if she's alright. Yes. She's perfectly fine. _Obviously. _

He fills the doorway of the bathroom and holds out the plastic bag. "I brought you clothes. Stuff you'd left at my place."

"Please tell me there's a toothbrush in there." He nods. "Thanks." She takes the bag. "When did you go home last night?"

He shrugs. "Eleven? I don't really remember."

"Oh." She turns away and takes the toothbrush out of the bag. There is a half-empty tube of toothpaste in there. She recognizes it from his bathroom, the way it's curled up at the end. Quistis squeezes a line of it on the brush, and takes her time. The mirror magnifies the bruises on her temple, the white bandage threaded through her hair. Underneath it is a line of ten stitches. It will leave a scar, but her hair will cover it, supposedly.

She is not vain, but she wants to cry at how easily breakable she is. Surface damage, she reminds herself. It will all fade in time.

She rinses off the brush and pulls out the clothes, a pair of soft yoga pants and a well-worn t-shirt that isn't hers. She holds it up in a question. It is a men's shirt, huge and dark green.

"I couldn't find any of yours," he says with another shrug.

She slips off the paper gown with her back to him, and she hears Seifer's sharp intake of breath, hears the sound of his footstep as he comes closer.

"What?"

She can _feel _his fingers hover over her shoulders, not touching her.

"You've got all of these little scratches," he says. "All here." His phantom fingers move down to her shoulder blade. "Nasty bruise here. God, Quistis-"

There is the sound of his footsteps walking away, and from the other room, she can hear a string of cursing leave his mouth. There is the clatter of something metal falling over. She wonders what he's destroyed.

She picks up the shirt from where she set it on the sink. Raising her arms is agony, and it is sweet relief when she lets the hem fall down over her hips. The pants are easier, soft cotton and forgiving elastic that sit below her waist. She doesn't think she can manage shoes, not without help. She has to sit down for several minutes on the toilet just to recover from the effort of dressing.

Quickly, she finger-combs her hair out to the best of her ability- her shoulders hurt too much to lift her arms very high. Quistis shuts off the light, and walks out into the room, leaning heavily on the wall. Seifer is sitting on the edge of the bed, all of his attention on the floor.

"Seifer..." She doesn't know what to say. _Why did someone try to kill me?_ That would be a good start.

"Can I ask you a question?" His interruption surprises her.

"Sure," she says slowly, and she is _very _sure she does not want to know what the question is.

"Were you still in Garden when you showed up here?"

The grenade dropped so long ago finally explodes. Her stunned silence is apparently all the answer he needs.

"Never mind," he says. "Forget I said anything." He gets up and moves to walk out.

"Seifer- wait." She reaches out and grabs the sleeve of his shirt. The plaid cotton is faded and soft. "Did Xu say something?"

He yanks his arm out of her grasp. "She said you basically only showed up in Dollet because you were _assigned_ here. That I was your _mission._"

She nods slowly. "That's true. I was on inactive suspension. I was just supposed to be gathering intelligence. Garden wanted to- they wanted to see if I was still _capable_." It comes out of her mouth bitterly.

"Intelligence." The word is an expletive coming from him. "On me?"

"They threw me out anyway, Seifer. I didn't do what they wanted. I _couldn't_, not after I got to know you." Her voice is desperate, so much more so than she wants it to be. She has the sinking feeling that this is it- this is how they end, in a hospital room screaming at each other, and she cannot have that, _cannot _be alone. Not after-

"What the fuck did they want from _me_?"

"Just- they just wanted to know if you were- sane."

"Sane," he repeats. "That's great."

"I told them you were," Quistis throws back. "I'm _sorry_, Seifer. I had to. I was going to lose Garden." _I lost it anyway. _

"So, the entire fucking time was a lie, just to gather _intelligence._ On my fucking sanity. That makes me feel awesome, Trepe. Really. It does."

His harsh use of her surname is a knife in her heart.

"I'm sorry," she repeats. "Seifer- I _love _you. I just-"

Her hand curls up over her abdomen.

_xx_

She's going to fucking cry, and he cannot stand the way her face screws up like that; it puts a vise around his heart and _squeezes. _

There is some part of Seifer Almasy knows that what she says is true. She _does _love him, as fucked up as that is. No one's ever said that to his face. No one he can remember, anyway. He's too _damaged _for that.

But she's just as fucked up as he is, isn't she? A victim of Garden.

_So _what_ if she was assigned to get close to you? It doesn't fucking matter. She's out of Garden. She's severed her ties there. This is her life now._

Her hand curls up over her abdomen, and he is brought back to sharply-grounded reality.

"And since _when_," she says softly, "do you get to play the blame game? I'm the one who nearly got killed because of some _job_ that you're supposed to be doing."

The words are a stinging slap, and there are tears on Quistis' cheeks, and he doesn't know what the hell to do.

"What the hell were you doing, anyway?" she continues. "What _job_?"

He doesn't owe her a fucking thing.

(He owes her _everything_.)

"I did it for Fujin. They couldn't fucking afford her hospital bills, and I couldn't just _let _her die." The words come tumbling out. "But I told them I was _out_, that I was done with their bullshit. I didn't need the money anymore, obviously."

"What job?" she repeats again, dully. She knows the answer. It's pretty obvious.

"What other fucking job do you give an ex-mercenary?" he snaps. "I killed people to help Fujin, and it didn't even fucking _matter_, because she's dead anyway." He looks at her, and her expression is indecipherable. "I didn't know they would come after you. I didn't think-"

She is so close to him, and they might as well be a million miles apart. This is how it ends, then. The poster couple for fuck-ups, their whole _relationship_ built on lies. There is nothing left to say.

"Seifer..."

"Don't," he says. "Don't say-" _Don't say you love me, or you forgive me, or any of that bullshit. _

What she does next surprises the hell out of him.

Her touch is a butterfly's touch, so light as she reaches up to touch his face. Her palm is soft against his cheek. She rises up onto her toes. Her kiss is a feather-brush across the edge of his lips.

He doesn't fucking _deserve _this.

The thought surprises him. What the hell does he deserve, then?

His arms come up reflexively and wrap around her shoulders. Her head turns and rests against his chest. His chin nestles in her hair. And even though she lied to him, he lied a hell of a lot to her, too.

_I'm sorry_, she whispers into his shirt. _I'm so sorry._

"Me, too," he mumbles. Her skin smells faintly of iodine, but he does not want to ever let go. He isn't sure he _can. _

_xx_

The stairs are an insurmountable mountain pass, and Quistis has to remind herself that she's walked across entire _countries_. This is just five steps. Five. Not hard. She deliberately does not think about the staircase leading up to her bedroom. What on earth had possessed her to buy a house built for goats? And why the hell is there no railing? What horrible design flaw _is _that?

"Come on," Seifer says. She holds fast to his arm and together, they get her up the stairs in one piece. The doctor wasn't kidding about the dizziness. She swallows hard against the nausea roiling in her gut. She's never been very good with motion sickness. She hates fairs and flying and roller coasters, because they all end up with the same stomach-in-her-throat feeling.

He makes a comment about the disaster of her bag, and finally pulls out her house keys. She points out the right one, and there is a twinge of sadness at the sight of her car key hanging there. She _loved _that car. She _slaved _over that car, she and Zell armed with repair manuals and how-tos and-

_It's just a car_, she tells herself. She has insurance. She can get a new car. Maybe a tank. It seems like a good choice.

Seifer helps her to the sofa, and she collapses into the cushions. Her head is pounding. She is shaking with the effort of getting inside.

It's been a long day, and it's not even noon yet.

"Can you make some coffee?" she asks. He disappears. He doesn't come back for a long time. She thinks she can hear him upstairs, for some reason.

"House is clear," he says, loping down the stairs. Oh. Right. She'd almost forgotten someone was _trying to kill her. _"What'd you say?"

"Coffee," she repeats. A lot of coffee. A whole gallon of the stuff. "And some acetaminophen. Not the aspirin."

She has one medium-sized cup. It soothes her. She wants another. She resists the urge. She eyes Seifer's mug.

Seifer watches her. "You want more?"

"I can't," she says mournfully. "I can't have the caffeine."

"Oh." It takes him a second. "Oh," he repeats. "Right."

Dammit, someone is trying to kill her, and she can't even have enough coffee to deal with it. She rests a hand on her still-flat stomach. She's only ever briefly entertained the notion of children, and never did it occur to her to imagine this particular scenario. Not here. Not with Seifer Almasy.

Her purse sits on the coffee table, and Quistis hooks her fingers around the strap, dragging it toward her. There is a carefully rolled white envelope stashed in there. She unrolls it.

"Here," she tells him, holding it out. "I don't know if you'll be interested."

He takes the envelope and pulls out the nine-by-twelve piece of film. It is a mass of muddy grey tones. "What's this?"

"They did an ultrasound yesterday. When I got to the hospital. I wasn't supposed to have one for another couple of months. They gave me the film before you showed up this morning." Before everything almost went straight to hell. "You can't really see much. But see there?" She points to the edge of a solid mass of black in the middle of the frame, where a faint white shape sits.

He squints at it. "That's it?"

"Yeah." She rests her head on his shoulder. "That's it."

They sit in silence and look at the film in his hands for a long, long time.


	11. eleven

_eleven_

They have exactly eight days of peace.

Days one through three, they spend a lot of the time talking, breaking down what they know about the organization that dragged Seifer in and will not let him go. Quistis puts in a word to Selphie Tilmitt, all the way on the other side of the world in Esthar. Seifer is opposed to the idea from the start.

"She's going to report it-"

"Selphie quit a long time ago," Quistis tells him for the fifth time, "when they stopped funneling money into the repairs of Trabia Garden." She doesn't elaborate on the issue- the only reason Trabia Garden even _needed _the money for repairs was because Seifer was following the orders of a witch. "She's doing work for Laguna now."

"What if she talks to Loire? What then?"

"She's not going to say anything. I'm not even telling her anything specific, just to trace the number you have." Quistis pushes her glasses back up on her nose and puts her fingers back on the keyboard. The bruises across her face are fading, little by little, yellowing around the edges. Sometimes she forgets how bad they are. She avoids mirrors, for the most part.

Seifer leans over the edge of her chair and studies her screen. "I still don't think this is a good idea."

"Yes, well, we don't have many options. It's not like either of us can waltz into Balamb and use their communications room." She hits the enter key. Her laptop makes a pinging noise, sending the message. She shuts the lid of her computer, slips off her glasses, and massages the bridge of her nose wearily. She needs a nap.

She needs a new _life. _

Seifer has already gone over everything he knows with a fine-toothed comb. The group is called Savior. His bank has informed him that the routing numbers on the deposits are out of Galbadia, but they already knew that. Five minutes on the internet gives them a street address, 108A, Cross Street, Deling City, Galbadia. He has killed approximately fifteen people for them so far, most of them white collar criminals that the police can't (or won't) touch. He won't tell her the name of this last target.

She gets up and crosses into the kitchen. There is a bag of frozen peas in her freezer, and she pulls it out. It's close enough to an icepack to count. Quistis wraps it in a towel and presses it to the side of her head; the throbbing dulls immediately.

Seifer glances away. The guilt he feels must swallow him whole sometimes, because whenever he touches her, it is like she is made of glass.

_xx_

On day four, Selphie finally gets in touch with her.

"It's a number out of Deling City," she says. "There's not a lot on the group, just that they're a legally incorporated business in Galbadia. There aren't any records of what they do, and their tax history is clean."

"Okay," Quistis says. "Thanks, Selphie."

"No worries," her friend says. "I appreciate having something to do. I'll keep you posted if I find out anything else."

_xx_

On day five, this is fucking ridiculous. They should be preparing for war, and instead they are sitting in an office decorated in tiny baby animals. There is a border of ridiculous little chocobos all around the waiting room- it is the least offensive thing in here. He almost wishes he hadn't quit his damn job; any other environment would be less nauseating than this office.

Quistis sits next to him, filling out a form on a clipboard. (_I can't reschedule_, she tells him as she applies her makeup. _I have to go._)

So here they are. At least there's not a ton of people here- it's easier to keep an eye on the exits. There are two other people in the waiting room with them, a man and a woman who is _hugely _pregnant.

He cannot imagine Quistis like that, balanced and sure-footed Quistis, tripping over her own damn feet because she can't see them, huffing as she walks around the small room like this woman, who stops in front of them. He's slightly concerned that she's going to fucking give birth right here, the way she's panting. He turns his attention elsewhere, back to the stupid chocobo border.

"So," the woman says, "when are you due?"

_What fucking business is it of yours? _It occurs to him that he's actually not entirely sure of the answer to the question, however. He glances at Quistis.

"March," she says. He files away the information. March is a long fucking way away. He doesn't know if he's going to make it to March.

"Lucky. You're in the easy part. Wait until you're as big as a house."

"Mhm." Quistis' noise is noncommittal. She writes something on the form. Seifer kind of wishes she would just tell the other woman to fuck off.

"You look familiar though. Are you on TV?"

"No."

"I _know_ I've seen you somewhere- honey? Doesn't she look familiar?" Her husband looks up from his magazine, glances at Quistis, and shrugs.

Seifer watches the pen bend just a little in Quistis' grip as she replies, "I'm sorry, no. We've never met."

"Quistis Trepe?" a nurse calls from the doorway. Seifer has never been so grateful to see medical personnel in his life. They stand.

"Excuse me," she says to the other woman.

"Quistis- oh! You're that SeeD. It was in the papers." The woman is not budging, latching on to the sudden insight like a bulldog with a bone. "What on earth happened?"

"That's classified. Excuse me," Quistis says again, her voice carefully, dangerously neutral. "I have to go."

She pushes past the other woman. Seifer follows her, and it is only when they are out of earshot of the other couple, now gossiping with each other in hushed tones, that Quistis mutters something under her breath.

Seifer raises an eyebrow. "Clever."

She slugs him gently in the arm. The nurse looks at them like they are insane.

Hell, they probably are. There's a target on their backs and they're in a damn chocobo-themed office.

Quistis asks him what's so funny. He can't explain it to her.

_xx_

On day six, Quistis walks into the house with three stuffed bags, groceries, from the looks of what is peeking out of the top of each one.

"Are we planning for the apocalypse?" he asks, as she pulls out random things, piling them up onto the table. There isn't very much of it considering the size of the bags.

She hands him one of the half-full bags. "No, but I need you to clean that."

He looks in the bag. There is a box that fills up the bottom of it. When he opens it, there is a pristine black handgun nestled in a pile of foam packing peanuts.

"It's not my birthday for four months," he says. "You shouldn't have."

"Shut up," she tells him mildly. Her second bag of groceries contains a nearly identical box. The third one elicits a quart of milk and six boxes of bullets wrapped in bubble packaging.

"Where'd you get them?"

"I ordered them online. My Garden ID is still valid in some circles, apparently." Quistis does not elaborate further.

He whistles, and sits down at her kitchen table. She tosses him a roll of paper towels. There is a cleaning kit in the bag as well; he pulls that out. There are sounds of cabinets being opened and things being put away, and then she joins him at the table.

She strips down her weapon without preamble, and, watching her do it, Seifer actually loses track of what _he's _doing.

"Impressive," he comments.

"Mm," she says neutrally. "Pass me a paper towel?"

_xx_

On day seven, when the evening is winding down and the kitchen sink is full of dishes, Quistis silently takes his hand and leads him upstairs into the bedroom. When she undresses and there is still _damage_, everywhere, he thinks this might be a bad idea.

"Quistis..." he begins. He cannot hurt her. He _can't. _

"Please," she whispers. "I'm not going to break."

He opens his mouth to respond, but she presses her finger to his lips, and draws him down to her.

_xx_

He is so gentle that it makes her want to cry.

_xx_

At 12:01, on day eight, Seifer's phone rings.

"Tick tock," the voice tells him. "Time's up."

"Go to hell," he says, and hangs up.

He dresses in the dark, and is heading out into the hall when Quistis wakes up screaming.

xx

She sleeps in fits and spurts, falling in and out of the same dream a dozen times. There is the scream of tires, the blast of an explosion, the film of red that obscures everything. She sees a girl with light hair, running away in a white dress that flows behind her.

She is in an alleyway with Seifer cradled in her arms. She feels his blood seep out of his chest, and she weeps hot, bitter tears that eat away at everything.

She feels the rush of magic in her veins, a cure, a cura, a curaga. Nothing works.

There is the twisted shriek of ruined metal and there is the sound of a gunshot.

It doesn't make any sense.

_Seifer!_ His name from her lips a thousand times, all falling into the silence that stretches between them.

He runs to her, in his old grey coat, his hand out for hers, and there is the bloom of a red rose above his heart, and he falls and falls and falls

and she cannot catch him.

There is the screaming ring of something in the distance. _Go to hell_, his voice whispers.

She wakes up sobbing in the darkness, and for a panicked second, she thinks she has gone blind, but then the light is on and he is there, and he is _alive_ and she cannot breathe. She takes in great, awful gasps that choke her and strangle her and she is going to _die_ and there are spots in her eyes, the rush of blood beating in her ears-

_tick tock tick tock_

the ticking of an infernal clock.


	12. twelve

_twelve. _

Somehow, she has always known that it would come back to Balamb. The ferry bumps against the dock. They disembark. Their luggage is light. Enough for a couple of days. They've packed optimistically.

She can see Dollet's skyline when she strains her eyes. Home is so very far away.

They walk through the front gates of Garden. Total silence greets them, and a buzz of chatter goes in their wake. She looks straight ahead, her feet traveling paths she has walked a thousand times before. Seifer is next to her, too close, his hand hovering over the small of her back. He will not touch her. He will not be weak in front of these people who think he is the devil personified. She wonders how many lessons these cadets have learned about him. How many lies and slanderous mistruths that have been spoken in these halls, how _wrong _they are.

No one joins them on the elevator to the commander's suite. She hadn't expected anyone to.

Xu greets them in her office. She takes in Quistis' blank expression, her red rimmed eyes and the fading bruises on her face. There is no sense covering them up. Let Xu say what she will.

The commander looks at Seifer, leaning against one of the massive bookcases like he owns the place.

Quistis knows that she is passing judgment on them in turn. She accepts that. She accepts the bowing, the scraping, and the begging that will be required of her.

It takes her fifteen minutes to relay their version of the story- the one where Seifer is not killing people, where he cannot be punished for his actions. It has taken them most of the morning to put their version together, rehearsing and reframing. All Xu needs to know is that someone is after Quistis' life. It should be enough.

"How am I supposed to know that any of this is true?" Xu slips off her thin reading glasses and regards them critically.

"Because you're my friend," Quistis says simply. "Because I need your help."

"I can't just drop everything and help you because you said _please_." Xu gestures at them. "I have to think of Garden."

"I can pay you." All of this gil, unspent, unwanted, sitting in her bank account. It could all be resolved with a check.

Xu sighs. "That's not the point, Quistis. How would it look for Garden to stick my neck out and help you and Almasy? It wouldn't be good."

It's always politics. She wonders how she ever did this, keeping up appearances, accepting that things were the way they were- her dress code, her mitered-corner bed, infinite, incessant standards of hair length and style and three mile runs every afternoon until it was as easy as walking to the beach and back. Orders. Always orders. She is glad to be done with it, and so, so angry to have to come crawling back.

But she swallows her anger and her rage and sits with her hands folded in her lap, and begs.

"I told you she wasn't going to fucking help us," Seifer says. "She's got too much of a stick up her ass to help you."

"Almasy, I'm going to have to ask you to leave if you can't keep your mouth shut."

"No," he sneers, and it startles all of them, the harshness in his tone. "I will _not _fucking leave, and I will _not _keep quiet. She gave her whole damn _life _for you, and you threw her out on her ass because she wasn't fucking _good enough_. You _owe _her this much. And you fucking _know it. _So you can take your fucking Garden image and shove it, and help your goddamned friend."

There is silence. Quistis looks at Xu.

Xu looks away.

Quistis gets up out of the chair, and leaves.

_xx_

She buys two tickets for Galbadia at the train station. Her bag is heavy on her shoulder, and she shifts it. "Here," she says, handing Seifer one of them. "We tried."

He takes the ticket. "I can't believe that she wouldn't do shit for you."

"I can." The truth hurts. She's used to it.

Xu has always been career Garden. It's what she's lived for, being the commander. This is every single one of her teenage dreams come true, and Xu will let _nothing _besmirch that reputation. Not even friendship- _loyalty, friendship, love. It's what we need to find our way back. _

She sets down her bag and sits on the bench next to him.

"I have to tell you something," Seifer says. "That last job?"

"Yeah?"

"Xu was who I was supposed to kill."

She isn't surprised. It makes sense, the way he fought tooth and nail to avoid coming to Garden. The way he avoided every mention of her name. The way she heard quiet shouting in the hall in the hospital. This is the war she's in now- it's Seifer or it's Garden.

She's made her choice.

"You should have just told me."

He sits forward and looks at her. "I didn't, because I knew it would hurt you. And I couldn't do that to you."

"How very noble of you."

He exhales. She feels a twinge of guilt.

"What are we going to do now?"

"I guess we go to Galbadia, and take care of this ourselves. I'm not going back to Dollet and cowering in fear."

He nods. "Okay."

That is that, then. If there is going to be war, it is going to be on their terms.

The train pulls in right on schedule, and when Quistis climbs aboard, she has the distinct feeling that this might be the last time she ever sees Balamb. She cannot explain the sensation. Marching off to war, marching off to die.

She is Garden's child, all right._ Onward, ever onward. _

The town is gone from her sight within the blink of an eye. She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes.

_xx_

They're being followed.

They _have_ been, actually, ever since they got off the train. Seifer makes a quick left, sets the bag of takeout down, and waits until his follower pauses, unsure of what just happened. At least it's just one of them. There have been at least three different ones since they pulled into town.

There are gloves in the pocket of his coat, thin leather ones. He slips them on.

He lunges out like a python, and slams the man in the black topcoat against the brick wall of the alley. There is the sound of something cracking, perhaps skull, perhaps spine. He doesn't care.

"What the _fuck _do you want?" he snarls.

The man's mouth moves soundlessly for several beats. He looks like a fish. Seifer rears back and slams him into the wall again.

"A meeting-" There is blood on his stalker's lips. "A meeting with the boss. Inside my pocket. There's a card. An address. You need to be there."

Seifer glares at him. "Get it out yourself," he says. There's no way to tell what's waiting for him if he sticks his hand in there.

The man fumbles, and produces a thick cream colored business card.

"Here," he says, "here, take it."

Seifer shoves the card into the pocket of his pants.

"Okay? That's all I was supposed to do. Give you that card."

"No. It's not fucking okay."

It takes six pounds of pressure to snap a man's neck. Seifer leaves the body in plain sight in the alley.

_There's a message for you, you fuckers. _

_xx_

She is standing by the window of their room in one of Galbadia's less classy hotels, her gun loosely in her hand, and she misses Save the Queen terribly. She'd feel more comfortable with the familiar weapon in her hand. But it is _Garden _property, despite the horrifying amount of money she has sunk into it over her many years, and therefore lives in a locker in Balamb's weapons storage. The handgun is impersonal. It's not familiar. She _needs_ familiarity right now.

She mostly just wants this over with.

Quistis stands at the window and looks down at Deling City, at all the tiny people running around like rats in a maze. She could never live here, not with this many people. She already feels trapped.

_Hunted. _

The door to the room opens. She snaps into defensive posture.

"It's just me," Seifer says. He drops a greasy paper bag on the floor and shrugs out of his overcoat. There is a streak of blood on his t-shirt.

"What happened?" she asks. That's not his blood. It can't be.

"We've been invited to a meeting," he says. He withdraws a business card from his pocket and tosses it on the bed. "Here."

_108A, Cross Street. Deling City. _

Exactly what their search had turned up.

"The home base, you think?"

"I don't think they'd be that stupid," Quistis muses. "I call trap."

He snorts. "Obviously. But what choice do we have?"

There is a brusque knock.

Both of them still, guns drawn, pointed straight at the door.

"Hey," a woman's voice says. "I'm not waiting out here all day. Are you going to let me in or not?"


	13. thirteen

_thirteen. _

He turns the collar of his coat up against the rain and hunches his shoulders. The weather's gone from bad to worse. It's going to be a nasty storm.

She is waiting for him in a narrow alleyway just outside of the shopping arcade. There aren't too many people around. Perfect. The storm's driven away any potential witnesses.

"Xu," he says, and she turns, and her eyes widen in recognition. He draws. He fires. The gunshot echoes forever down the alley, the world's deadliest clash of thunder.

She stumbles back, pressing her hand against her stomach. "Seifer-"

He watches her fall. He turns.

He leaves.

It's over.

_xx_

It is impossible to be in the same room with her and not think about just aiming and firing and ending this whole damn mess. The shoulder holster hangs heavy under his arm.

There is a map of Deling City spread out over the bed, and the three of them stand around it, looking for weak spots. Xu has brought thirty aerial shots of the building and the surrounding streets. She's been busy.

"Savior is run by multi-billionaire Darius Johne," Xu says. "There are all kinds of rumors that he's got his finger in almost every gray-market pie, and there's a _lot _of speculation that he funnels in a ton of money to the Galbadian army because of his direct opposition to SeeD."

Quistis is silent, her arms crossed, frowning down at the map. "Johne?" she repeats.

"Yes."

"He said you killed his son," Seifer interrupts. "That's why he wants you dead."

Xu glances up at him. "You've been in contact with him?"

_Shit_. He hadn't meant to let that slip. Whatever. It doesn't fucking matter. They're probably not going to make it out of this alive.

"Yeah," he says. "He called me. He said that killing you was necessary because you failed his son. That was your _crime_."

Quistis sighs. He pretends he doesn't hear her.

"Well," Xu says. "That's interesting. I'm not going to ask why he was in touch with you- I have a feeling I don't want to know."

Seifer leans against the wall.

"Oh my god," Quistis says. "Johne. Marcus Johne. He was on the team in Centra. That explains everything. Why he's going after you, why he tried to have me killed. If you weren't dead, I was good enough. And if he used Seifer to do the work- Xu, no one would think there would be anyone else behind this. Not with his notoriety."

Seifer interrupts, "Standing right here, you know."

_Played like a puppet again,_ he thinks. This isn't the first time. He's getting goddamned sick of it.

"You have to go to this meeting," Xu orders. "Tell him that you succeeded. I can have an assault team here in a couple of hours. We can bring the son of a bitch down."

"I'm pretty sure this asshole's following every move I make. He already _knows _I'm in town. How the hell are we going to convince him that you're dead?"

"Because," Xu says patiently, like she is explaining this to a child. "You're going to kill me."

He raises an eyebrow.

_xx_

The building is large and unadorned. The lobby is spacious. Empty. His footsteps ring out on the tile floor. There is a woman waiting in front of the elevator. She presses the button, and the doors slide open.

"Top floor," she tells him.

It's not surprising.

He wonders if Xu has made it to her position, if her team is as secure as she thinks it is. The blood packets she rigged were spectacularly convincing. He checks his watch- she's been fake-dead for twenty minutes. That's got to be enough time to convince these bastards that this whole thing can come to an end. No one has to get hurt.

The elevator doors open. He steps out.

_xx_

The office of Darius Johne is crisply appointed. Seifer stalks in, dripping onto the marble floor. An enormous guy stops him at the door.

"Coat," he orders. "And your gun."

Seifer drops his overcoat onto the floor. He snaps the gun out of the shoulder holster. He hands it over. The guard subjects him to a rough pat-down.

"Hey, you touch my ass again, you owe me dinner," Seifer snaps. "Get your hands off of me."

The guard steps back. "He's clean, Mr. Johne."

"Mr. Almasy. We meet at last. Please, have a seat. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Scotch?"

"She's dead," Seifer snarls. "Now leave us the hell alone."

"One of my men has already reported that information to me. Well done. I'm afraid you're just a little behind schedule, though. I was rather hoping you were more efficient than this."

"So what? It's only a couple of days. It doesn't matter."

Johne picks up a heavy glass paperweight from his desk. "Are you quite sure you won't have something to drink?"

"I told you. _No._"

"Ah, very well, then." Johne lifts a narrow slip of paper from the stack. "Here. Your final payment."

"I don't want your fucking money."

Johne sets the check back down on his desk, arranging it so the edges are precisely aligned with the center of his desk blotter. "You know, you've surprised me, Mr. Almasy. Most people with your skill set would be eager to have gainful employment. What good is a job stuck in a cubicle if you're still scraping money together just to pay the rent every month? You and I, we had a very lucrative thing going. I simply hate to see that alliance come to an end."

Seifer crosses his arms and glares. "Are we done here?"

Johne shakes his head. "I'm afraid we've got one minor problem, as it were."

"What problem?"

There is movement behind him; before he can turn, the pain explodes low in his back, and for a second, he isn't entirely sure what has happened. He reaches back. His fingers come away red.

"You see," Darius Johne says, his voice fading, and Seifer is dimly aware that there is the strangled sound of someone yelling in the hall, "you can't just _pretend _to kill a SeeD commander. We do double check these things."

His eyes roll up in his skull.

_xx_

There is the frozen heat of a potion being poured down his throat, and that is what rouses Seifer out of nothingness. He swallows reflexively. There is the taste of blood.

"Oh, good. You're alive. I was beginning to worry."

Someone has propped him up in a chair. He digs his fingernails into the soft leather armrest. The pain in his chest is the worst thing he has ever felt, the feeling of having his face torn open multiplied a million times and then repeated every time he breathes.

"_Almasy_," and it's Xu's voice that hisses at him. "Almasy, open your fucking eyes."

"You ought to listen to your friend. That's very good advice she's giving you."

Seifer blinks, hard, trying to dispel the black spots swimming in his vision. Xu is sitting across from him. There's a streak of blood on her face and a lot of it smeared across her chest. The fake blood packets they'd rigged. It looks too real. He cannot focus.

"Fuck you," he says, but the words come out weak. _Quist-_

Xu shakes her head once, quickly. Did he say her name out loud? He closes his mouth and clamps his arm over his chest. There is the agony of tiny icy fingers weaving away at his insides, trying to repair the bullet's damage. He does not look down at his shirt. He doesn't want to see how much blood is coming out of him.

It's too much, he knows. More than he can spare.

"Now," Johne says. "Please. I don't want to have to drag this out unnecessarily."

The security guard takes Seifer's gun, checks the clip, and hands it over to his boss. Johne holds it, weighing it carefully in his hand. "Heavier than I thought it would be," he comments, and points the gun at Xu. "This is for Marcus," he tells Xu patiently. "I told him to trust his commander. To trust his Instructors. He did. Because of your orders, he's dead. Do you know what that's like? Coming home to a letter saying your son has been murdered taking a _test_?"

"It was a tactical error. It could have happened to anyone," Xu snaps. "Garden isn't some... _high school_. Everyone knows there's risk."

"We're no longer at war," Johne replies. "Garden should have been disbanded after the war. There should have been no honor promised, no talk of glory. That's what drew my son to Balamb. The glossy photos on some _brochures_ in our mailbox."

"On behalf of Balamb Garden," Xu says stiffly, "I apologize for the death of your son."

Her eyes are fixed on Seifer's. Her mouth moves. He's having a lot of trouble making out the words.

The protect spell settles around him, a faint shimmer that sinks into his skin.

"Thank you," Johne says.

He fires.

_xx_

She lays on her stomach on the rain-slick roof of a shiny corporate high-rise, and sights down the barrel of a sniper rifle.

She doesn't like this plan. It's too loose, too full of room for errors. The last transmission she received from Xu was from twenty minutes ago, a whispered _bang_ in her earpiece. The code word that sends Xu's hand-picked team into place around the building.

Seifer walks into the office of Darius Johne, and she watches him through the sight on the gun, watches the frisking, the long conversation. He sits down at one point, disappearing out of range. It gives her a clear shot. They don't have a choice. This is how it must go—they must cut off the head of the beast.

She centers her target, inhales, exhales. She applies gentle, even pressure to the trigger. The gun recoils just enough to nudge her shoulder.

_Eagle down_, someone yells into her ear. _Eagle down. _

What? No. That's not right. That was a direct hit. She can see it now, see Johne's body crumpling. She did it. They're saved.

But the SeeD repeats the words again, _Eagle down. _

_xx_

Xu's brain matter explodes over the dark wood paneling, and her corpse falls to the ground.

Dimly, Seifer thinks, _this isn't how it's supposed to go, _but he knows it is. This is the end. This has always been the end. _As long as you walk away alive, you're one step closer to fulfilling your dream. _

He's not going to walk away from this one. He is aware of the gun pointed at his face. He wonders how it's going to feel.

Quistis' face flashes in his mind, and he tries to hold onto her image. He cannot. She wavers and fades and falters, a failed video. He closes his eyes. He surrenders.

There is the tinkling of shattered glass. The impact never comes.

When he looks up, a red rose blooms in the center of Johne's torso.

"What-" he asks, but the question is never finished. There is a reflexive jerk of Johne's hand as he falls, and the gun goes off again.

_This isn't-_

_xx_

SeeD descends upon the building in a wave of black and blue. Xu's team only numbers twenty. It seems like so, so many more. Someone calls an ambulance, and it comes in a hurry, its lights flashing. She has ditched the rifle down a sewer, where no one will think to check. Three cop cars show up on the scene. She catches the phrase _three bodies. _It is a lie. It must be a lie.

She is halfway through the lobby when someone yells, "Make a hole!" People plaster to both sides. A team of paramedics rush by with a gurney. She catches a streak of gold.

"_Wait_!" she yells. There is the briefest of pauses. It is enough.

Seifer's eyes are closed. His shirt is soaked in blood.

Her heart crawls up into her throat and she thinks it might make a run for it. She hauls herself up into the ambulance. They don't argue with her.

The sirens wail into the night.

He spends a long, long time in surgery. She sits in a horribly uncomfortable chair, hands clasped loosely in her lap, and eventually, she has to close her eyes.

She is awoken by a gentle tap on her shoulder, and a surgeon is standing in front of her. The fear comes flooding back into her veins. She is awake instantly.

"He's fine," the surgeon says. "He'll make a full recovery."

They don't let her in to see him until three hours later, when the anesthetic slumber has started to wear off. There is a great deal of white gauze around his torso. His eyes are closed. She reaches out and touches his cheek.

He stirs. When he opens his eyes and looks at her, his wan smile breaks her heart all over again.

"Hey," he mumbles, his words slow and slurred. "You're okay."

"So are you," she says, around the hard lump in her throat.

"Xu is-"

"I know."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she tells him. She touches his forehead, stroking back through his hair. His eyelids slip closed again.

_xx_

Squall Leonhart shows up at the hospital three days later, dressed in crisp uniform, dragged out of retirement in the wake of Xu's death. They go to a cafe down the street, where she curls her hands around a paper cup of tea.

"I need to know the truth," he says.

She nods. She tells him everything.

None of it makes the papers, except speculation and rumor. These are quickly squashed. There is a lot of money being spread around to keep a story like this under wraps. The death of a Garden commander should be a media circus.

_You owe her. _

Xu's funeral is held two weeks later in Balamb. It is a somber, solemn affair. She and Seifer only stay for the burial, not the mourners' reception afterward. Her black dress is snug around the small bump in her belly.

Squall catches them as they're making their way slowly to the docks. Seifer walks like an old man, shuffling, one hand pressed against his torso. Three inches to the left, and there would have been no saving him. Quistis helps him down onto a bench. He digs a bottle out of his pocket and dry-swallows three of the painkillers from it.

"What?" she asks, as Squall jogs up to them in his dress blacks. Being forced back to work does nothing for him- he already looks like he hasn't slept in a week.

"Come back," he says. "You should've never left in the first place. The council made the wrong decision."

She looks at him, really _looks _at him, this man she grew up with and studied with and taught and saved the world with.

"No," she says, and maybe it's too harsh. "I'm sorry, but no." Better? Not really.

Squall nods, once, crisply. His salute is precise. He has accepted this role, he will play it as long as he has to. She returns the salute. It feels oddly final. Quistis lets her hand drop. Squall walks away.

"Come on," Seifer says, easing up off of the bench. "Let's go home."

Garden fades behind them. Something like guilt settles into her gut, but it is not a new feeling for Quistis Trepe. She will get over it. She always does.


	14. epilogue

_epilogue. _

They don't really talk about what happens in Deling City after the first few weeks. She misses Xu, though; sometimes she'll catch herself typing up an email. Once or twice, she even hits send, and gets an immediate delivery-failure notice. There is no one else at Garden now whom she wants to keep in touch with; the sense of finality when she realizes this is sobering. She knows Seifer dreams about it, though. He sketches out the manner of Xu's death. Her noble sacrifice. The protect spell that saved Seifer's heart from being shredded apart by a bullet fired from three feet away.

Afterward, when he takes a cab back to his apartment to get some clean clothes, she sobs into her hands until she feels like she is going to throw up with the force of it.

Xu is dead, and they are alive. They must carry on. They do.

The funeral heralds the arrival of fall. The week after they get back, her car insurance finally comes through for her with a check, and Quistis buys a new one, a black four-door sedan that came out this year. It's a good car, a stable, dependable vehicle. It makes her feel ordinary to drive it.

Quistis' birthday falls on a rainy Tuesday. They go out to a nice restaurant, and come back, and fall asleep in front of the TV. She doesn't mind. She's never really celebrated her birthday before.

Seifer tells her he loves her, sporadically enough that it still surprises her when he says it out loud. She makes him a copy of her house key, and as November slips into December, he moves in gradually, without fanfare.

The horrible morning sickness fades away as life grows inside of her. She is grateful when one morning, the scent of coffee doesn't immediately make her want to run for the bathroom. She makes a pot of decaf. It is, perhaps, the sweetest thing she has ever tasted.

It takes him a long time to recover from his injuries, and occasionally she will trace the outline of the scar with her finger, feeling all of its bumps and ridges. He doesn't try to get his old job back. He doesn't care. It turns out he has more money than he's been letting on. He just doesn't spend it on anything. They split the bills evenly, and switch off grocery shopping every other week. She sacrifices half of her closet. He remembers to keep the toilet seat down most of the time.

Sometimes, he'll go out and do some rogue monster clearing in Balamb's forests, just for something to do. Squall permits it. Garden even pays him for it.

They fight, occasionally, because they get caught up in thinking and brooding. More than once, she has grabbed her coat and gone for a walk, or he's disappeared to the bar for three hours.

He _frequently _says something stupid, if she says she's tired or needs some space or hell, could he _just_, for _once_, pick up his fucking socks?

They make up in frantic bursts of passion, or in a quiet, more subdued way- he touches her shoulder or she reaches out and takes his hand as they sit on opposite ends of the couch. Sometimes the resolution comes in the morning, when she brews a pot of coffee and he wakes up on the sofa, his hair sticking out in six different directions.

They are not perfect. They don't pretend to be. It keeps them sane.

She tries to bake a cake for Seifer's birthday. It comes out lopsided, but tastes pretty good. He smears icing across her face and kisses it off. There is a lot of laughter, a lot of stolen kisses.

Her belly grows little by little, under the strict watch of her doctor, who insists that she follow a regimented diet because she isn't gaining weight as quickly as he would like. One morning, Quistis catches a glimpse of her profile in the mirror and doesn't recognize herself. She goes to her ultrasound appointment during her twenty-second week just before the winter holidays. The technician asks her if they want to know the sex of the baby this time. She has been putting it off, and off, and off. She glances at Seifer, who's holding her hand as he stares in awe at the picture on the screen.

It is a girl.

She gives up her office for a nursery, and sometimes she'll find Seifer in there at two in the morning, just standing in the room, looking at the crib and the soft yellow paint, and she'll never interrupt him. She lets him have his moment, his stunned realization about the turn his life has taken. Truth be told, she is still having trouble accepting it as fact, no matter how many new clothes with elastic and extra panels she has to buy.

December gives way to January, to constant snowstorms and temperatures that keep them largely inside. She reads a lot of books. Seifer teaches her how to play poker near the end of the month, when Raijin comes up to Dollet for a visit. They spend a lot of time in the living room, drinking and talking and remembering Fujin, loud, boisterous chatter that is _incessant_.

She takes her book and goes upstairs.

_xx_

Eventually, after he sees Raijin to the door, he realizes that Quistis has been gone a long damn time. He wanders upstairs.

She is curled up on the bed, a book open in her hand, rubbing her stomach.

"You okay?" he asks quietly.

"Just tired," she says. She is _always_ tired now, almost eight months in, when she can't sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time without having to shift around. "She's restless."

He rests his hand on her belly, and feels the gentle nudge of little feet. It still stuns him, even now, to feel their child between them, and every time, he thinks that he will not be able to do this. He doesn't know the first thing about being a father. He doesn't think he'll be good enough- hell, he _knows_ he won't be. He doesn't even try to talk about it with Raijin. It makes him guilty just to think about it.

But he doesn't have a choice. He can't walk away. He can't do that to her.

Her fingers curl around his, and she holds fast.

"What's wrong?" he asks. He doesn't think he's done anything wrong- not today. He's put his foot in his mouth more times than he can count over the past few months.

"I'm just- worried," she says. "Scared. I don't know. It's nothing."

He draws her hand to his lips, kissing her fingers briefly.

"Me, too," Seifer says. It is a relief to be able to say it out loud.

She wakes him up at four-thirty in the morning with a muffled cry of pain, her face buried in her pillow and her hand clenched around her stomach.

_Get the car_, she tells him between clenched teeth, and he scrambles out of bed.

_xx_

It takes sixteen hours of screaming, _agonizing_ pain, the worst thing she has _ever _felt.

She actually fractures one of Seifer's fingers from gripping his hand so tightly- he returns from the emergency room at hour seven with a splint on his right hand. He gamely offers her his left. Brave of him.

By hour nine, she thinks that this cannot possibly go on for much longer.

At hour ten, she's convinced something is horribly wrong. It shouldn't hurt this much. The attending assures her that it does, and that she's perfectly fine. She tells the other woman to go straight to hell- she apologizes five minutes later.

"It's alright. It's not the first time."

Twelve. They give her a second epidural when the first one finally wears off. It is a blessed relief. She dozes fitfully, exhausted, until hour fifteen, when the contractions start coming in horrible earnest.

At hour sixteen, she delivers a six-week premature baby girl.

At hour sixteen, one of the nurses comments on how much blood she's still losing.

At hour sixteen, she doesn't remember anything afterward.

_xx_

He stands outside the window of the NICU, and stares in at the tiny child, hooked up to a dozen tubes and cords.

"Are you sure?" he asks, finally, not taking his eyes off of the child. _His daughter. _It is an impossibility he cannot come to terms with.

"I'm sure," the doctor says.

"Okay." Relief floods through him. He needs to sit down, he thinks. He leans against the thick glass. The text on the identification card swim into focus: _Trepe-Almasy, Hana Rue. _There are lots of words written under that that he cannot even begin to make sense of. Her name is entirely Quistis' idea.

"You can go in and see her."

There are monitors beeping, steady, rhythmic noises. This is the second time he has had to come to her like this, in the hour of her undoing, and he doesn't know if he can take it again.

But she lifts her head from the pillow, and smiles at him, and whispers his name.

It is the most beautiful sound he has ever heard.


End file.
